Third Species
by elfin2
Summary: Fanfic spinning off after new miniseries, crossover with a favorite book of mine. See if you can work out which one. Culture clash galore. Enjoy!
1. Third Species

**Chapter 1: Third species  
**

"Sensor contact," The young ensign announced. "Extreme range."

"Oh, good, just when life was getting boring," The very flippant Chief Ryant noted, taking her feet off the console and padding over to peer at the screen. "Never seen a signature like that before."

"Definitely not Kangas," Ensign Chen noted. "And not ours."

"Third species," Lieutenant Desultin, the watch officer, said. "If that isn't a blip you just made history."

"I'll run a check on all the sensors," Crewman Dmitri Ivanov said. "Make sure it's not a gremlin."

"Gremlin?" Desultin asked.

"Malfunction," Chen explained.

"The idea is that gremlins are responsible for all otherwise unexplained electronic malfunctions and foibles," Ryant said. "Dates back to, oh, twentieth century, I think. Ancient, anyway. Largely gone out of usage now. What is it, exactly?"

"Something small, metallic, scanning and transmitting... ah, yes, just passing the system heliopause now."

"Heading where?"

There was a pause while the numbers were crunched. "Straight for Avarin Three, sir," Chen said. "But it's small. Smaller than a Kanga planet-killer missile. Can't be more than a few tens of tonnes in weight or fifty metres long."

"Transmit a complete report and sensor recording to Miraq Base, Ensign," Lieutenant Desultin said after a moment. "And tell them to get the Admiral out of bed."

"Yes, sir." Chen typed in the commands on her board. After a moment, Ryant leaned over. "Let's just hope they're friendly. We've only just finished up one war. We don't need another."

"Amen to that," Ivanov agreed quietly. "Far too many people die in wars for my taste."


	2. Space and sensors

**Chapter 2: Space and sensors  
**

Lee Adama was more than a little uneasy about this patrol. On one hand, the fleet was in desperate need of water, oxygen, food, edible plants they could grow, soil, raw material and, well, basically everything. And this system had an apparently inhabitable planet. On the other hand they still had no idea where the Cylons were, his squadron of ancient Vipers were almost falling to pieces as it was, the fuel was as limited as everything else, and there had been those strange sensor ghosts the probe report had sent back that they couldn't identify at the time.

And that wretched Doctor Baltar had been about as much help as a wet haddock. Less, actually; a wet haddock could have gone on the dinner menu and improved the quality of the squadron's food remarkably.

He frowned, enjoying the view of space as he always did but not being seduced by it. He had read proposals for new, improved fighters shortly before the Second Cylon War, ones with no clear cockpits, just control panels, and he had hoped he would never be called upon to fly one. Still, there was something about the Big Empty.

"Got a contact," Starbuck's voice rang out over the intercom. "Looks like one of the long-range surveillance vessels entering the system."

"It's Cylon," Lieutenant Anderson confirmed seconds later; his Viper still had an upgraded sensor system. "They're coming in on almost a complete opposite vector from us. We're still screened by the comet head, they won't have seen us. Maybe they'll pass on by."

Lee glanced up reflexively at the comet head of ice and rock they had found in a convenient spot and hitched a ride behind. The fleet had also gobbled up what chunks of the ice they could catch and purify.

He put that thought aside. "_Federia_, power down as best you can. Make yourselves inconspicuous."

The captain of the _Federia_ snorted. "Yeah, like a cargo freighter comes with stealth systems." They did what they could, and the entire squadron waited with bated breath for Anderson to pronounce whether they had to fight, run or just wait.

"I don't think they've seen us," he said. "They're heading straight for the third planet... oh, frak. It's altering course."

"Towards us?"

Lee braced himself for a fight. "Can we run for it? Or get past them, maybe."

"We might be able to get past them," Anderson allowed dubiously, "If we stay where we are, in the comet's shadow, and jump off at exactly the right moment. They're not heading in our direction."

Lee paused, doing the course computations. This comet wasn't a regular visitor to the system, it would pass through once and once only, at high speed. "Great," he said. "How do we get out again if they decide to hang around?"


	3. A bad cliche

**Chapter 3: A bad cliché**

"Alright, let me get this straight," Admiral Istia Fenway rubbed her temples. "We have a probe coming in from one direction, followed by this little fleet who are trying to hide behind that anomaly of a comet the astronomers spotted last month. And we have a ship roughly equivalent to a destroyer heading here from another direction, and it's not the same kind of ship. So we've got two different sets of ships, both arriving in-system at the same time, one hiding and one hunting. Does anyone else feel that we've arrived in someone else's war?"

"And a bad cliché besides," Captain Tamsin Reese noted. "Quite frankly, Admiral, if I read this in a book I'd throw the book out the window."

"Well, whoever they are, the single ship is going to arrive in orbit within two hours," Commander Dashwood remarked. "And they'll pick up the normal chatter a bit before that; this colony never needed to keep its communications stealthed, after all, so we can't keep it all quiet without shutting down just about every computer on the planet."

"Well, this colony wasn't built to be a true military stronghold either," Fenway said. "We've got four orbital platforms, two destroyers, one fighter squadron and the ground missile emplacements, plus the Marine Corps militia and the Guardian Force, such as it is." Both forces were made up of weekend warriors, retired military personnel and eager young teenagers who hadn't finished their schooling or had dropped out early. There would be little hope for the colony in an ongoing battle unless they could hold on for the three weeks it would take for a Fleet convoy to arrive. There were drawbacks to being the first colony out that far, after all.

"Well, we can hope for the best," Captain Nakshitarh said gloomily. "But I'm not having my crew stand down from battle stations until this is over. Ma'am." He nodded through the viewscreen. "Call me paranoid, but this situation makes me very, very uneasy. I don't want to get caught in someone else's war, ma'am, not one bit."

"I agree completely, Captain," Admiral Fenway said, the deep lines in her face and the silver in her hair suddenly seeming very real. Fenway had served the Terran Fleet for nearly sixty years, and suddenly her quiet semi-retirement was looking to become very unquiet indeed. Yet she didn't seem to mind. "But just in case, let's see if we can find some anthropologists. Who knows, we might have a chance for peaceful contact for once."

"But we can't afford to assume it," Reece said.

"And in case we don't, what do we know about the weapons systems on these ships?"


	4. A distant battle

**Chapter 4: A distant battle  
**

"The Cylon ship is heading for the planet, not for us," Anderson finally reported. "But Captain? There's something in orbit, several somethings, and they're not Cylons."

"Another species?" Someone asked. "Or a lost colony?"

"Could be almost anything," Starbuck said. "Question is, are they friendly?"

"How's the Cylon responding to them?" Lee asked. That was the crucial question, because they really didn't need another enemy. The Cylons were quite bad enough.

"Hold on a momen... the Cylons are close... the Cylons have opened fire." The battle was far distant and showing only dimly on most of the scopes, and the _Federia_ wouldn't even be seeing that much, since it was an old cranky ship without modern equipment or anything even close to it. "Whoa! The Cylon ship was just destroyed."

"What, just destroyed? Just like that?"

"Evidently, sir," Anderson said.

"Well, that was... unusual," Starbuck said. Even the entire squadron would have been hard-put to do that kind of damage in ten times the time.


	5. Body parts and wiring

**Chapter 5: Body Parts and Writing**

Reece picked her way through the mess of equipment the salvage crews were laying out on the destroyer's hangar bay. She bent down to look closely at some of the panels.

"Shouldn't you be looking at the circuitry?" A voice behind her asked. "Or the computers?"

She didn't turn around. Lieutenant Commander Thieu had made no secret of the fact he considered patrol duty a gross injustice, with his skills with computers.

"Notice anything about these panels?"

"They're not too badly damaged."

"Right. They're also internal panels. See this? Bracket marks, and this one has part of a light panel attached to it."

"So they're internal panels and not part of the hull. So what?"

"This one here is about the fiftieth I've looked at. Not one of them has anything on it."

"It has a lighting panel."

"No writing. No labels. I can understand that they might not have manufacturers' marks or batch numbers on them, but how could any crew hope to remember what was behind the panels if they weren't labelled? There's no sign of anything, any form of writing at all, in this lot."

"So?"

"There's also been absolutely nothing we recognise as body parts. So maybe this ship was completely automated. Which might explain why it attacked like that - maybe our ships and satellites fit its criteria for something dangerous."

"Or it was remote-controlled, or there were bodies and we just haven't found them, or the life forms on board didn't leave a residue we'd recognise."

"Always possible - but we've got people analysing the spectra of the explosions and so far they've found no sign of organic compounds beyond simple synthetics and plastics. This stuff is primitive." She waved eloquently. "This hull panel? We were using this stuff round about the time we first ran into the Kangas. Most of this materials technology is four or five hundred years behind ours."

"Which explains why we won so easily."

"Yes, but was this a huge probe, a minor probe, a warship or an almost insignificant old boat?" Reese asked. "That's the crucial question."

Thieu snorted. "We'll find out soon enough. We have pretty much all their transmissions recorded, for one thing."

"How'd they manage that?"

"They fell into the limits we normally use to run the SETI program. We didn't know about it until half an hour ago when some bright intern pulled the satellite records and checked them."

"Yeah. That old program was about as much use as a chocolate teapot when it came to hearing Kanga transmissions. No wonder we didn't check. We'll have to downscale our thinking." She paused, drumming her fingers on her thigh. "Lieutenant Commander, in your opinion, would this craft have been a danger to a colony less well protected than ours?"

"Absolutely, Captain," he responded to the change in attitude at once. "Avarin is a lucky colony; we're right out at the Edge, so we could get a large chunk of the old military equipment the Old Worlds were replacing after we finished up the Kanga Wars. Most colonies this size have two satellites with minimal missile platforms and an armoury of hunting weapons in the central town. We've got ships, a garrison and ground emplacements. A normal colony might easily have damaged the ship but not destroyed it; it was a highly manoeuvrable design for its technology level and almost ludicrously well-armed."

She paused. "If there was no real need for a life support system on board, would that account for the extra speed and firepower?"

"Huh. I'll run the figures. It could account for it. But if that's right, we're going to need our edge of better technology. It may be the only one we've got."


	6. Potential ally

**Chapter 6: Potential ally**

Commander Adama looked around in surprise. "Just one Viper?"

"Yes, sir. Coming into communications range... now." Lieutenant Duella remained calm and collected. "Galactica calling Viper. Do you read me?"

"Galactica, this is Lynch," Lieutenant Caroline 'Lynch' Laroche said, her voice tinny from the old speakers. "I need to speak to Commander Adama."

Adama picked up the nearest headset and nodded to Duella, who patched him through. "This is Adama. Go ahead, Lieutenant. What's wrong?"

"We were approaching the system when we detected a Cylon scout ship headed for the third planet, sir," she said. "We remained hidden as best we could, but they didn't even seem to notice us. They headed to the planet, opened fire on an area of it, and were destroyed. We have no idea who they were attacking."

Looks were being swapped. "Were you spotted?"

"I don't think so," Lynch said. "No one tried to contact us that we could tell, and no one and nothing came in our direction. Instructions, sir?"

Adama and Tigh swapped looks. "Hold on a second, Lieutenant. Duella, get President Roslyn on the line. If we've found a potential ally, she'll want to know." Not to mention a potential safe haven for their tired battered fleet to settle on, even temporarily.


	7. Enemy enough

**Chapter 7: Enemy enough**

Laura Roslyn was dozing in her seat, papers and reports spread around her like leaves around a tree, when Billy came in to wake her up.

"Madam President, the Commander has asked to speak with you," he said gently. "It's about something the Vipers and the _Federia_ found."

She sat up and rubbed her eyes. She'd been falling asleep working all too often of late, trying to get the fleet functioning well enough to hand over to a successor before her body failed her. "Something useful?"

"Something that destroyed a Cylon scout ship." She looked up, staring, and then got up and left the scattered papers where they were, heading for the bridge.

"Where's Doctor Baltar?" she asked. "And what do we know?"

"They're waiting for you before they hold a conference." He ushered her into Colonial 1's cockpit. The pilot handed her a headset. If she wasn't being shuttled over to the Galactica, it had to be urgent.

"This is President Roslyn," she said. "What's going on, Commander?"

"Captain Adama's squadron detected a Cylon scoutship. Before it detected them, it attacked a section of the planetary surface and was destroyed somehow. We're trying to decide whether or not to scrub the supply mission and how to make contact."

"Should we make contact?" Laura asked. "They may decide to dislike us as well. Aren't the Cylons enemy enough?"


	8. Opening talks

**Chapter 8: Opening talks**

Captain LeBeau, the commander of the interceptor squadron, and Lieutenant Commander Thieu stared at each other across the table in shock before both lunging for the comm unit.

"Admiral Fenway?" Thieu said. "I think we've found something very important. Can you please come down here?"

A minute later Istia Fenway, Tamsin Reece, I-Chen Phuket, Florian Dashwood and a much-baffled sergeant pressed into service as a note-taker were crowded into the tiny cubicle.

"Alright, talk," Fenway said.

"We were going over the recorded transmissions from the battle and a bit before and after," Trace LeBeau reported. "There was one bit we isolated as being from the ships hiding behind that comet that's about to pass out of the solar system. It was scrambled, but once we filtered out the garbage and ran some decryption programs, we got this." She ran a recording that was mostly static. "Now, if I were human, I never would have caught it…" Fenway waved an arm for her to continue. Trace LeBeau was over three hundred and forty years old, a biosynthetic computer who had utterly enjoyed her three hundred and thirty years as a fighter pilot. She and Tamsin had grown up together, in as much as a computer could be said to grow, and had often served together as close friends. The fact that she wasn't human was no secret, although never advertised openly. "But I heard speech. Human speech. Once I knew what I was listening to I refined things a bit, and we got this."

She hit the play button for a second sound recording.

"Got a contact. Looks like one of the long-range surveillance vessels entering the system." A female voice, young, with a strange accent.

"It's Cylon." A male voice, same accent. "They're coming in on almost a complete opposite vector from us. We're still screened by the comet head, they won't have seen us. Maybe they'll pass on by."

"They weren't screened from us," Thieu muttered. Fenway waved a hand to hush him.

"_Federia_, power down as best you can. Make yourselves inconspicuous."

"And they speak English," Reece noted. "Which is unlikely even for humans."

"Yeah, like a cargo freighter comes with stealth systems." An older, huskier voice but still with the odd accent, the strange pronunciation of vowels. "See how much closer to the comet head you can get."

"Any closer and I'll be scraping ice off the viewscreen. We're not exactly nimble here, Captain."

Trace hit the button. "There's a couple of hours more to analyse. I'm unscrambling as I go and having the computer prepare a transcript. I can tell you a couple of things - that accent is Old North American, from Earth. So's the dialect, more or less. And this scrambler system is basic as hell. They're a long way behind us, technologically."

"But they speak English," Reece said. "Even the Kangas never really learned English. They're probably human. But where'd they come from? Is there even a ship registered anywhere called the _Federia_?"

"There are seventeen," Thieu sighed, "of which nine are cargo freighters. But they're all accounted for so far as the database goes. Which isn't very far - there's even a corvette named the _Federia_ in spacedock at Procyon, being dismantled for scrap since it was too badly damaged to be worth repairing. Oh, and they use Captain and Lieutenant as a military rank, and their fighters only carry one man apiece, unlike ours. We're still processing."

"Can you get me a com-line to them on the same frequency and rig it up to be scrambled just like their conversation?" Fenway asked.

They all looked at her.

"Yes, ma'am," Thieu said after a moment. "If you think it's a good idea."

"I'd like to know what we just killed, Lieutenant, and where this little fleet fits into the equation. I want some answers. Besides, I doubt they were alone. This planet is only lightly defended and all too easy to overwhelm. I want to know what's out there to attack us. Let's head up to the bridge, and you can get me that comline. Captain LeBeau, find out what officers we have who took diplomacy and first contact courses."

"Already checked, ma'am," she sighed. "You got a choice of four - Ensign Martin Llwellyn, of the Marine Corps - he's full-time in the quartermaster's office…"

"Wasn't he the one who started the food-fight last year?" Dashwood asked suspiciously.

"Yes," Phuket said. "Got six days confined to barracks scrubbing floors, too."

"He's also got a missing foot," Reece said. "Lost it in combat, and he's the unlucky one in fifty-five thousand who can't take transplants. Even ones cloned from him. I had him in sickbay last week for a check-up and a physical." Reece was the senior medical officer on the planet, among her other duties, and had an encyclopaediac memory for her patients. "Lieutenant Shinghua Wu," LeBeau continued, "Who passed the course on paper but has been heard to say tact is a mutual agreement to be full of shit"

"I've met her," Fenway said. "If we ever need another interstellar war, I'll send her to do the negotiating. No. Who else?"

"Commander Atarani. Your XO on the Alabama."

"No way. He's great at routine and terrible at anything else. Besides, I want to have a head diplomat who can look after themselves in a fight, if they're not friendly. And how come there's only four?"

"It's a very unpopular course," Dashwood said. "It's never been needed since we stopped trying to talk to the Kangas, so most people don't take it and do something like biochemistry instead."

"Who's the fourth?" Phuket asked.

"Tamsin Reece."

Reece's jaw dropped. "Yeah - three hundred years ago! When I was at the Academy on Midgard. I was nineteen, Trace, and the rules were different then. Besides, I only took it so I'd have an easy class in between maths and military law in the morning."

"Suit yourself, but the four of you are the only ones who have any idea what the legal, ethical and military protocols are for first contact. Admittedly a lot go out the window since this lot speak English and could be human, but still…"

Thieu shook his head. "She's our only military doctor. Can we spare her?"

"For routine things, the orderlies, nurses and corpsmen have everything in hand," she said. "And for the surgeries and the like, you can call on the civilian doctors. I lend them a hand often enough that they won't mind repaying it too much. But if you do intend to keep me being a diplomatic, you should request another CMO." She shook her head. "What am I saying? I hate having to watch what I say all the time."

"I can think of one very good reason it should be you, Tamsin," Fenway said. "I doubt anyone else on this planet has as good a grasp of the need to hang onto secrets. I can trust you not to reveal things that would be imprudent. Even the Intelligence officers wouldn't know what to say and what not to in that regard."

"You mean not to tell them what we can and can't do, what our forces are like…"

"How wretchedly vulnerable since we started demobbing after the Kangas lost their homeworld…"

"Where we think the Kanga remnants fled to," Reece said slowly. "If any of these people know where to find them…"

"Then we could be in the shit well and proper. Those blasted politicians have run our military down so much in the last twelve years we're hardly fit to fight another war. We're so out of position it's not funny. Whatever else you do, Tamsin, don't let them know that. Now get me that comlink, Thieu."

Minutes later they were standing around on the bridge with a recorder rolling. The strangers' conversation was broadcast on the main speakers.

"But I still say we could sneak in, around the backside of the planet…"

"If I could make missiles like that, I wouldn't be so stupid as to leave a blind spot covering half a planet," someone else replied.

"We need those supplies, Captain," a third voice said. The voices were distorted and crackly, far poorer than the Terran Fleet were used to; their equipment was meant to give clear communication. "The Fleet's…"

"I know what state the Fleet is in," a male voice ground out. "And we wait for orders, clear?"

Trace made a motion to catch Fenway's eye. "That's the guy in charge, I think," she said. "I think his name is Adama."

"Alright. Thieu, you ready?"

"Speak and you're on the air, ma'am," he said, turning to face her and taking his hands off the keyboard. "It should work. It's really not all that complicated a scrambler to set up." Reece let a flicker of amusement cross her face at his arrogance, but she was the only one.

"Captain Adama?" Fenway said into her microphone.

"Who was that?" The voice said after a moment.

"Admiral Istia Fenway, Terran Fleet. Mind telling me what you're doing in my solar system hiding behind a comet?"

The silence on the airwaves could have stunned an ox.

**Author's note:  
Yes, the chapters are short as the story kicks off. They get longer now.  
Oh, and I forgot the disclaimer: Own nothing, claim nothing, don't bother to sue, you can't get blood out of a stone.  
**


	9. Frak me

**Chapter 9: Frak me**

"We'll wait for Lynch to get back," he decreed.

"Is that wise?" Starbuck asked. "We're losing our chance."

"Yes. We'll wait."

"Captain Adama?" The voice sounded strange, like the speaker had trouble pronouncing some sounds, and said the vowels oddly. It certainly wasn't one of his squadron.

"Who was that?" He asked.

"Admiral Istia Fenway, Terran Fleet. Mind telling me what you're doing in my solar system hiding behind a comet?"

He hunted for words, mildly stunned.

"Frak me," Kara muttered.

"If that word means what I think it does," The dry voice said, "Then sorry, lady, but I'm already married, and my tastes don't run to women. Thanks for the offer, though."

Someone laughed. Lee finally found his tongue. "I didn't know it was anyone's solar system. We just came for some supplies."

"A statement which begs a wealth of questions," She said. Fenway. What sort of a name was that? Was there any Admiral Fenway on the Colonial Fleet rolls? And what was the Terran Fleet, anyway? Where was this Terra? Or was it Terr? "Let me put it another way. Are your intentions hostile? And I am talking about your people in general as well as the ships with you in particular."

He worked his mouth hard. "We're not here to start a fight," he said.

"That's it? 'We're not here to start a fight'? Well, I doubt you're on the same side as that ship we blew up given you're cowering behind a comet at the moment, but I'd like to know who they were and how many more are coming up behind them. Not to mention where you all fit into this little jigsaw puzzle we've got here."

"What's a jigsaw puzzle?" Kara asked. Lee wanted to kick her.

"They're Cylons," he said simply. "We're at war with them."

"They're not anything to do with the Kangas, are they?"

"Who are the Kangas? I've never even heard of them."

"How about Trolls?"

"What are they?"

"Well, that answers that one. If you'd met them, it would have made quite an impression. They tend to do that, usually right after they've wiped out a planet or two." The cold even voice made his stomach clench. Had they wandered into a war even worse than the one they were escaping? "Alright, Captain Adama. Let me put it this way. I'm not going to get annoyed over invasion of territory or some such idiocy; what I'd like to do is send a ship back with you to your home…"

"No."

"Why not?"

"We won't lead a ship of people we don't know back to our home." No need to give away what that 'home' was.

"Alright. We probably wouldn't just give you the coordinates of our home planet either. How about a shuttle, or a single fighter?"

Lee wished like fury he could ask for advice on a private channel, but he didn't have one. And how the hell had they cracked the naval codes in the first place? Could he ask advice and still be leader?

He thought furiously. "We'll take a single ambassador. But not on one of your ships. On one of ours."

"Hold on a moment." There was a click.

"Lee, what the hell are you doing…"

"Captain, we can't just…"

"If we…"

"The President said…"

"Everyone shut up," he said. "They might still be listening."

"We are," Fenway said. "We'll send one person, in a space suit, out to your location and you can take them back to your fleet or station or outpost or whatever, alright? But I won't send them unarmed, and I will expect them to communicate within twenty-four hours, or there will be - how do diplomats put it? An Incident." He could hear the capital letter. "I will not just abandon one of my people, Captain. I expect them back."

"I understand," Lee bit the words off. "I will pass that message along to my commanding officer and the civilian authorities." Was that too pompous? No, it was just right. He couldn't take responsibility. Not sole responsibility, anyway. He only commanded a Viper squadron.

"Alright," Admiral Fenway said. "How long before you have to go back?"

"Not long."

"What, an hour, a day, a week, ten minutes…"

"If we use the same units of time, about an hour."

"Alright, I'll have our best diplomat pack fast and dispatch a cargo shuttle. Don't be surprised if it's armed, pretty much everything in orbit here is."

"One condition, Admiral," he said. "We are at war with the Cylons…"

"So we shouldn't go giving them information? I'm not completely ignorant of how the game is played, young man. We will do our very best to give them no information that we do not also give you, but if they wish to establish diplomatic relations we'll give anything they say the same consideration we give to what you say. That's all the promise I'll make."

Lee thought about it for a moment. They had taken out a Cylon scoutship with a single missile. There were multiple ships in orbit, and this wasn't their home world. It might be a major colony, a tiny outpost or anything in between. They could use the weapons. They could also use the protection. And supplies… perhaps some kind of trade deal could be negotiated, if they had anything these people wanted.

"Alright," he said. "Make sure whoever you send has plenty of air. It's several hours to get back."

"Alright. I'll tell our newest ambassador to pack a bag." There was a pause. "We won't stop recording your conversations. I'm telling you that in all fairness; you're welcome to record anything about us you can. For us, that's normal operating procedure. If anything about this can be considered normal."

"Alright, Admiral Fenway. We'll wait for your… ambassador."

"Thank you, Captain." There was a click again, as if she'd stopped transmitting.

"Lords of Kobol," someone muttered. "That was strange."

"Who the frak are these people, Apollo?" The _Federia_'s captain asked.

"I have no idea," he admitted. "I guess we're going to find out soon."


	10. Let's get this show on the road

**Chapter 10: Let's get this show on the road  
**

The cargo shuttle, as they called it, was larger than the _Federia_. "You reading me, Captain?" A voice said.

"Yes. Who is this?"

"Ensign Makhra Juthandi. Pilot of this tub. I understand I am to deliver you one interstellar diplomat. Given we're talking people here, there's no paperwork."

"Is that supposed to be funny?"

"Actually, yes. I guess you've got to see the number of forms we usually have to fill out to understand. I am also under strict instructions from the Admiral not to, quote, initiate any action that could be considered threatening, endquote. I guess she doesn't want another fight so soon after the first one. Now I've just got one question."

"What's that?" Kara asked.

"Is our man going to have to hook onto the hulls of your little stubbies, or are they going to go on that big ship?"

"You could hook onto one of our Vipers?"

"I could," A new voice said, sweet and melodiously female, "Since they're ferrous, and our suits come with the option of magnetic boots. Or I could just find the airlock on your, ah, _Federia_, and use that. It's much the same to me. How much space is there on your cargo ship?"

"Very little," the captain growled.

"Alright, I'll just hook on a line to something on the outside. It's really no trouble. I've travelled under worse conditions in my time." The huge sleek white craft disgorged a tiny red figure from an airlock indistinguishable from the hull so far as Lee could tell and used suit jets to head straight for them. He hoped someone had a camera rolling. "Which one of you is in charge?"

"I am."

"I know that, Captain, which ship are you in is what I meant."

"I'd rather not say."

"That's alright, I'll read the name-plates. Ah." Seeming to spin in space as she arced over the top of the squadron, some kind of panel attached to one sleeve and a bag towing behind, she altered her vector to do a perfect landing beside his cockpit with barely a wobble conveyed. She might have been out for an evening stroll before squatting down on the hull so their eyes were almost on the level. Or presumably they were. It certainly looked human - two arms, two legs, a head, all in the right places. The helmet was opaque; he couldn't see any details.

It waved. "Morning," she - she? - said cheerily. "Let's get this show on the road, shall we?"

"All Vipers, head for home," he said. "And would you mind…"

"I know, I know, I make a better door than a window." She slid down to rest behind his cockpit, her boots staying stuck to the hull. "Nice paint job back here."


	11. Terran Federation

**Chapter 11: Terran Federation**

The _Galactica_ had picked up the returning Viper squadron easily and Commander Adama frowned. "They can't have run out of air so soon. Give me a voice link."

"Yes, sir," Lieutenant Duella did so. "_Galactica_ to Viper squadron, come in please."

"This is Apollo; go ahead, _Galactica_."

"You're back early, Captain. Is something wrong?" Adama asked his son. He had to keep reminding himself to be professional with the boy.

"Not exactly, sir," he said a little uncertainly. Few would have picked it as that, though.

"Commander Adama," a new voice began.

"Who is this?"

"Captain Tamsin Reece of the Terran Fleet. Admiral Fenway decided to make me a temporary ambassador. In the name of the Terran Federation, hello, welcome, and what the hell is going on?"

Everyone on the bridge was staring at the speaker, the Commander or the sensor readout.

"I'm not quite sure what you mean, Captain," he managed.

"Well, there's quite a few things I'd like to talk to you about on behalf of my people. Like who you are, why you're here, why your ships were trying to hide behind a comet, how you know what that ship that attacked us was, why they attacked, how many more are out there, what your intentions are - there's more, but I think that will do for now." Her voice was perfectly calm and measured.

"What are _your_ intentions, Captain?"

"Well, at the moment, a meal and a chance to get out of this suit would be nice. Other than that - I am instructed to make peaceful contact as much as circumstances permit, establish what level of threat you represent and what level of threat these Cylons of yours represent, and try to avoid any major diplomatic incidents. Oh, and I'm supposed to come back alive. That's about it, Commander. I'm not here to start a war."

Looks were swapped across the bridge. Adama jerked his thumb and Duella cut the comline. "Find President Roslyn," he told Tigh. "And that Doctor Baltar, too." His thumb jerked again. "Captain Reece, I hope you didn't bring any kind of locator device with you. We don't want to disclose the whereabouts of our fleet."

"Well, we know that already, so it really doesn't matter," she said mildly. "Our sensors are better than yours. If you're asking if I brought communications equipment that these Cylons can detect being used, then the answer is no."

"Alright," he conceded, wishing he had studied diplomacy a bit more. What was he supposed to be doing right now? "You'll arrive in about ten minutes, correct?"

"Yes. At present I'm hanging onto a fighter hull like a limpet. I'll just hop off at the right moment and land on suit jets. I've done screwier things in my time." What was a limpet?

"You can do that?"

"Oh, sure. This type of suit was originally designed for long-duration EVA repairs on ships or equipment, so it's very manoeuvrable. I'll be fine. See you in ten minutes, Commander." The com channel cut off.

"Who the hell are the Terran Federation?" Tigh asked.

Author's note - In case you couldn't tell, the book is David Weber's 'The Apocalypse Troll', and it never said what the name of the unified human government was. I just picked one out of the air. I suppose you could say the Terran Republic, but I decided to go for something a little more martial. If it bothers you - tough cheese! I intend to keep writing this one.


	12. She's a child

**Chapter 12: She's a child**

President Laura Roslyn was glad she'd taken the time to visit the _Galactica_ and talk with the engineers to help coordinate fuel consumption in the fleet. There was such a shortage of tillium now that every scrap and scrape they could save was worth saving. When she was called up to the bridge, it was only a short walk.

"Evidently our strange companions decided to send an ambassador," Adama said without any preamble. "She's touching down in the landing bay with the fighters in ten minutes. I was just going to head down there."

"Do we know anything about her?" Roslyn asked, long-submerged diplomatic protocols surging to mind. The cancer might be eating her body, but it hadn't touched her brain.

"She said her name was Captain Tamsin Reece. Strange accent. Says an Admiral Fenway sent her out here, and talked about the Terran Federation, whatever that is. Does it sound familiar?"

"No, it doesn't. You're sure it was a woman?" It could be an alien.

"Sounded like one."

"Nothing else?"

"She wasn't very friendly." How inadequate a phrase.

"Threatening?"

"No, just wanted answers."

"I'm not even sure what the questions were," Tigh said. "Who the hell is this woman anyway?"

"That's what we're going to find out." The three people waited with Billy hovering in the background while the deck-crews prepared to receive and refuel the Vipers. Adama knew the drill by now, and within minutes all the Vipers were safely aboard and the landing pods were retracting.  
The tiny figure in a red suit had been actually sitting on one of the Vipers, but managed an expert landing at the very edge of the landing bay, using suit jets to perfectly balance herself. Given that she was landing at the precise point where the zero gravity of space left off and the artificial gravity of the ship started, that was no mean feat.

She passed through the field of landed fighters with ease as they bay was pressurised. She shucked her helmet and looked around, examining everything around her minutely.

"She's a child," Roslyn said in surprise.

"She looks, what, seventeen?" Tigh said.

"And she's an ambassador?" Roslyn shook her head. "That's ridiculous."

Adama couldn't help thinking that even Zack had lived longer.

Author's note: I'm not taking too much notice of the series except for character development. It only started screening over here after I'd startd writing this, so where it conflicts - live with it.


	13. Welcome aboard

**Chapter 13: Welcome aboard  
**

Tamsin shucked her helmet once the pressure was up; no sense letting these Colonials - who named themselves that, anyway? Colonials of who? - know about the airtight forcefields built into the suits if they didn't need to.  
She watched as the pilots hopped down out of their fighters. The nearest had been the last to land, the most skilful - what was her name? Thrace. But they all used codenames. Starbuck, that was it.  
"Hello," she said. The woman was tall, white, blonde. A tomboy, a fighter.  
Kara looked her over. "Hi."  
Lee Adama ducked around under his fighter's nose. He saw Tamsin and felt surprised. He'd pictured her as a lot older, or an alien. She was painfully young.  
"Hi," he said.  
"Hi," she reached out to shake his hand. They had even that in common - species, language, social gestures… "I think the welcoming committee is waiting," he looked over her shoulder. Tamsin glanced at the window out of the bay.  
"Who's who?"  
"The bald man is Colonel Saul Tigh, the second in command. The other man is Commander William Adama, he's the commanding officer. The woman is President Laura Roslyn."  
Tamsin filed the question of how they got the President out to the fleet so quickly in a growing list of other questions. Like why this wasn't a military fleet, more like a shipping convoy… Oh, dear. What if this was their civilisation?  
And was Adama a common name? There wasn't too much of a resemblance. Perhaps they were related, perhaps not.  
"And the ones behind her?"  
"The blond one is her aide Billy Keikeya. The other one is Doctor Baltar. He's an advisor of sorts."  
"Don't like him, huh?" She made it a rhetorical question. "And your squad?" He helped her put names to faces as they moved to the doors. The three solemn-looking commanders were waiting.  
"Captain Reece," Adama Senior said, "Welcome on board the Battlestar Galactica. I'm Commander Adama." He saluted her.  
"Thank you, Commander." She returned the salute.

Author's note: Short and not particularly sweet, I know. Next chapter's longer. Promise.


	14. Impressions

**Chapter 14: Impressions**

Roslyn watched with curiosity. The woman - no teenager could be so self-possessed - was medium hight for a woman, less if her bootsoles were thick, with a mane of tawny gold hair done in a bun. That colour and crinkle curl could only be a gift of nature. Her deep green eyes were the perfect complement to porcelain skin marred only with freckles. She was young, pretty and her eyes never stopped moving. She moved like a kickboxer. She also wore a holster with a strange weapon in it on a utility belt and carried a bag with the strap slung across her chest between her breasts. She didn't look at all threatening.

She moved away from Captain Apollo and headed towards them, moving with no sign of discomfort. Her usual gravity couldn't be too dissimilar, then.

"Captain Reece, welcome on board the Battlestar _Galactica_. I'm Commander Adama."

"Thank you, Commander." Roslyn noted in passing that she saluted right-handed, but her palm faced out instead of down. She turned to the rest of them, the entirely clear helmet of her suit held under her left arm. The suit fabric was more like actual fabric than real suits, and seemed to be completely formfitting and very thin. It also had no visible air-tanks, and no controls or read-outs. There was no sign of a seal between helmet and neck, or gloves and arms, or boots and legs. Even her gloves looked no thicker than a pair of leather gloves. It was more like a body glove than a space suit.

"Captain Reece," Roslyn smiled and extended a hand. "I'm Laura Roslyn. President of the Colonies."

"I'm surprised I rate an immediate visit with the President," She smiled warily.

Roslyn realised, with a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach, that this girl knew nothing about what had happened to the Colonies.

"Well, it's a long story," she said. "Would you like to change and come with us up to the bridge?"

"I'd love a chance to change," she said. "These suits are pretty and all that, but they're not very comfortable."

"There's a changing room through here for the female pilots," Lee Adama offered. "We were going to get changed now, but…"

"Oh, that'll be fine. Can you three give me just one minute?"

"Certainly," Commander Adama said. The strange young woman followed the departing pilots. "Impressions?" Adama asked.

"She's older than she looks," Roslyn said. "She's combat-trained," Tigh said. "Notice how she never stopped watching everyone around her?"

"I wonder where she keeps her air tanks," Roslyn said. "There's no room for them in that suit."

"I wonder what kind of civilisation sends a woman that young as their only ambassador," Adama said. "I wish I knew more about what we're dealing with."

"We know they beat Cylons," Roslyn said. "Let's take it from there. We could really use their protection."

"But why should they offer it?"

"Well, finding something to offer them would seem like my job, Commander."


	15. The Age of a Cadet

**Chapter 15: The age of a cadet**

Kara Thrace, Caroline LaRoche, Tiana Mong and Indira Mekhi - the female pilots of the squadron - started to shuck their suit jackets. "How do you open that thing?" Kara asked her curiously. "It's got no zippers."

Tamsin grinned. She touched a spot on the left shoulder and a seam appeared down the back. "I do that." "You don't wear anything underneath?" Tiana asked.

"Why should I?" She asked. "It only gets in the way." She didn't seem in the least bit shy. Kara swapped glances with the other pilots.

Reece opened an invisible seam in her black bag and pulled out underwear and a shirt. The shirt was a long-sleeved light brown affair with a black square printed on each shoulder and a patch on each arm of a red cross on a white background. Her trousers were black, neatly cut and had socks as part of the garment instead of separately. Her boots were tight-laced and also black. "Black's a big colour for you, huh?" LaRoche asked.

"There's several colours in the Fleet," she said. "Black's one of the most common. Among other things, it's the colour of the day-to-day wear of the medical service. My dress uniform, which is white, is gathering dust in my gear locker and is about as comfortable as a threshing machine." She fished out a jacket that was black with silver square shoulder pins and a different patch on the arms - two green snakes wrapped around a brown staff on a grey background.

"You're not a diplomat," Kara said dangerously.

"It's a small colony with a minor military presence. Less than one officer in two hundred is trained in diplomacy these days and almost all of them end up in politics. We only had four officers who'd taken the courses at the Academy and I'm the only one who's actually capable of being diplomatic."

"So you're a doctor?" Indira asked. "What kind?"

"Combat surgeon." She took the holster off the suit and slapped it onto her belt - literally. It stuck without any visible attachment. "This was supposed to be a nice quiet assignment."

"Aren't you a bit young for that?" Tiana asked suspiciously. She was forty-five and had been taken off the flight line due to advancing age until Commander Adama had called for extra pilots. "No, but thanks for the compliment." She somehow turned her rigid helmet into something that folded down to the size of her hand and packed it all away. Elapsed time, sixty seconds. "I better get moving."

The four pilots stared after her. None of them had even gotten their flight boots off.

"I want one of those suits," Indira remarked.

"She looks too young to be a doctor," Tiana said. "She's half my age, if that."

"Doctors don't usually train as cadets, do they?" Caroline said. "I mean, she said she went through officer's training."

"Add that to medical school - she'd have to be at least thirty, wouldn't she?" Indira said.

Kara just frowned and kept changing. "I still want to know how they broke our frequencies."

**Author's note: More chapters coming very soon, I promise**


	16. Crews and Cybernetics

**Chapter 16: Crews and cybernetics**

Commander Adama's quiet interrogation of his son was broken up barely ten words in as Reece emerged in her uniform.

"That was quick," he said after a moment.

"I've had practice."

"Shall we go?" Tigh said. "It's this way."

She nodded and eyed the corridors curiously. Adama wondered if she would get lost a lot learning her way around.

"How many crew on your ship?"

"Two thousand is the usual complement. How about yours?" He carefully avoided giving a precise answer.

"There's about a thousand military personnel on Avarin. The destroyers each carry a hundred and fifty, each orbital platform has another fifty, about a hundred and fifty people on the ground of various kinds including me, fifty-odd crew for the interceptors and the other three hundred are essentially part-time reservists that never get called up in harvest season."

"Two destroyers."

"Yeah. Soviet-class. Elderly but still sound. They're rugged old hulls."

"And the interceptors?" Lee asked.

"Our fighters. They carry a pilot and an electronic systems officer. They are divided into two wings of ten fighters each, and the wing leaders carry a communications sergeant to help coordinate things. The other eight personnel are spares, essentially, to make sure we always have a full complement of pilots and ESOs."

"Okay," Lee said. "What's the range on your interceptors? How long can they stay out?"

"If everything's working right, they can stay out and keep flying until the crews starve to death. With the supplies they usually pack - a year, tops. Take combat damage and that's usually cut down quite a bit, though."

All six of the Colonials walking with her stopped to stare. So did all the pilots and deck crew who'd been listening.

"A year," Lee said. "You're kidding."

"No, I'm not. They're designed for long-distance pursuit, among other things. Although there are damned few people who'd want to live inside a flight suit for a solid year." She shuddered. "Imagine the smell! Not to mention the monotony and claustrophobia. Are your fighters capable of independent interstellar travel?"

"No," Commander Adama said. "They're not."

"Thought not; they're too small. Our interceptors are. And one of them would fill most of your landing bay."

"How do you fly them? I mean, visuals, sensor readings only…" Lee asked. "You couldn't see all around like in a Viper. It'd be too big, too many things in the way."

"Direct linkage to the control interface circuitry."

"Direct linkage meaning…" He looked baffled.

"Cybernetic implants," she explained. "Connects the brain directly to the computers."

"You have a computer in your head," Baltar said incredulously.

"No, just the interface connections. The computers are all in the interceptors, never inside the skulls. All military personnel get the primary package once they pass basic training, but there's not much use for most of it. Computers are still mostly accessed through terminals. The interceptor crews are an exception, they get a far more extensive job. Most of my implant is aimed at interfacing with medical equipment, since I'm normally a surgeon."

"Not a diplomat?" Laura asked.

"No. We don't have any at Avarin. I'm the next best thing."

"Talk to me some more about this interface circuitry," Baltar said as they walked. He sounded nervous.

"I can't imagine…" Lee trailed off.

"It's not that bad. There's no actual computing capacity built in for most military personnel - some civilians, yes, and a few specialised services. Not the majority of us. Well, a simple calculator and a bit of electronic memory, no more than you can fit into the kind of calculator I used at high school. Nothing big."

"Why not? I mean, you could put an encyclopaedia in someone's head," Baltar said.

"Ever since we started experimenting with direct neural interfaces, the people who designed them took paranoia to an extreme and tried to think of absolutely everything that could possibly go wrong in the field - accidents, corners cut on production, sabotage, infiltration, stupidity, and of course everything the enemy could do - and figure out how to avoid it hurting the user. It's virtually impossible to control the bigger ships with it because of the software cut-outs - we only have it on the interceptors because it's faster."

"I'm sorry, I don't see the connection," William Adama said.

"Cuts down response time by better than half a second and increases situational awareness during a battle. That alone makes it worth it." She shrugged. "There's a fair bit of purpose design in the industry - the stuff Marine Corps Raiders use, for instance, to interface with weapons targeting circuitry. The kind of shots their snipers can make have to be seen to be believed." She shook her head. "If we don't want to use the 'plants, we can just shut them down."

"How about infiltration?" Tigh asked. "Ever had trouble with enemy programs?"

"A few," she admitted. "But doing that to a military net carries a compulsory death penalty, on our side, and it's never been infiltrated remotely by the enemy without enough warning for us to shut the implants down. Besides, it's a strictly one-way link, brain to exterior computer." She caught their look. "The brain controls and directs the computer. The link cannot be used to control the brain, we always build them that way. And there's a strictly finite limit to the amount of information the human brain can process - that's the kicker. We can't just create a huge information repository and hook a brain into it."

"You can't, oh, build circuitry that can think for itself? Make tactical decisions when humans are too slow?" Baltar was fumbling for coherent questions as huge new vistas opened up to him.

"No. The law makes it impossible to do that in the military. Why are you so curious about our cybernetics?"

"We've… had some bad experiences," Lee said very carefully.

"Ah. So the Cylons _are_ synthetic."

"They're artificial intelligences," William Adama said. "How did you know?"

"Clues from the wreckage of the ship we destroyed - and the lack of body parts." Reece shrugged. "But our law doesn't require someone to be human to have rights. It just requires sentience, that's why we don't use AI software, because we'd have to accept it as a person. If these Cylons can build spaceships, they probably qualify on that alone. If they want to talk to us, we'll at least give them a hearing."

"They've tried to wipe out the human species," Roslyn said stiffly.

"Or your part of it," Reece said. "But the bottom line is that unless they go to war with us as well, then we'd need a reason to take sides. That's not just my opinion, by the way; it's the Admiral's orders, and it's the law for diplomatic contacts." She paused. "Did you make the Cylons? Create them as a race?" She had wondered, with the way they said things.

"They're not a race," Adama said.

"Yes," Tigh said tightly at the same time. "Forty-five years ago."

"And you've been at war with them ever since?"

"There was a forty-year armistice," William Adama said.

"Really? Our last war lasted five hundred and ninety-six years. We won. Let me guess - you lost, and this fleet is all that's left."

"Yeah," Roslyn said. Her throat pinched. "That's right."

"Well. I can see this is going to take a while."

**Author's note: A nice long chapter, as promised. I live for reviews.**


	17. Finding Earth

**Chapter 17: Finding Earth**

**  
**"Alright," She took a seat around the plotting table, seeming to not notice how people stared at her. Roslyn was sure no teenager could manage such a degree of indifference while still being totally aware of her surroundings. "So you had better start walking me through your history, political structure, basics of your laws. That sort of thing."

"You first," Roslyn said. "This Terran Federation of yours, how big is it?"

"According to the last census I saw, we had sixty-seven planets with a population of over a hundred million for a total population of just under a hundred and fifty billion."

"How many people in your military?" Adama asked.

"If you look at the entire Fleet, the Marine Corps, the smaller local defence forces - and exclude the part-time reservists - you're looking at better than nine billion. That's been steadily decreasing since the war finished, though."

"Nine billion," Adama looked shocked.

"Less than one billion currently stationed aboard interstellar ships."

"Oh." They still looked shocked.

"Each planet or other stable celestial body with a population of under five million has a Planetary Governor who acts as a representative of the President; the Governor is appointed by the President - or, in reality, by a staffer of the President, since there's so many of them - and when the planetary population hits a hundred thousand the Governor is elected by the populace. The rules for elections to the Senate or Parliament are much more complicated - two houses of representatives. The Parliamentary reps are elected, one per planet that doesn't have a Governor; the Senate is done by borders drawn arbitrarily based on population percentages as determined by a formula in our Constitution. There's a hundred senators, and at present, six hundred and ninety-six Parliamentarians. Or possibly more; we're at the tail end of the news services out here, and there were five more applications going through sometime this week that we haven't heard about yet."

Everyone looked surprised at the numbers. "What system did you use?" She asked after a moment.

"We had a two-house system," Roslyn said, "Senate and Congress. There were a hundred and forty-four senate seats, twelve per colony, and five hundred Congress seats apportioned according to population."

"And the Senate was the upper house?"

"Yes."

"Same for us. And you had an elected President, and a Constitution."

"No, we didn't."

"I think you call it the Articles of Colonization." She caught the look Adama flashed her. "I talked with your son and the other pilots on the way in." He nodded. So Lee Adama was his son. She had wondered.

"Well, yes, but it's not a Constitution as I understand the word."

"I'd like to read your Articles sometime." She frowned. "Only twelve colonies?"

"We only had twelve habitable planets. The Colonies of Kobol were - well, we hadn't finished filling up the planets, so we never needed to look for more planets to settle."

"How long had you been settled there?"

"About a thousand years," Adama said.

"And before that?"

"Our forefathers fled from Kobol after a nuclear war made the planet uninhabitable," Roslyn said. "There aren't many records. Weren't many records."

"And how long were they on Kobol? And where was it?"

"We don't really know," Roslyn said. "Perhaps another thousand years."

"And before that?" Reece had adopted a poker face.

"We don't know. Religion aside; you should talk to Elosha, the head priest in the fleet."

"That's interesting," she remarked. Only one religion? Better not discuss that until she understood it a bit better. Too easy to offend someone.

"Why?"

"Because we've only had space travel for aboutnine hundred years."

"Well, there were thirteen colony ships. Not twelve." Tigh shook his head.

"Yes, yes, I suppose you could be the descendants of the thirteenth," Baltar said. "Oh, but the numbers - how could there be so many people?"

"Even if we bred like rabbits, the math doesn't work, unless it was a humongous ship," she agreed.

"Maybe it goes back further than that," Lee said.

"How did the language survive unaltered?" Roslyn asked. "How come you speak our language at all?"

"It's just English," Reece said.  
"That's not what we call it," Tigh said.  
"What happened to the odd one?" Reece asked. "The thirteenth ship. The one that isn't accounted for?"

"We don't know," Adama senior admitted. "Legend has it that it established another colony on a planet called Earth."

Reece laughed. "Sorry. I shouldn't find it amusing, but I do."

"What's so funny?"

"My parents were born on Earth. Humanity evolved there. We've been around for millions of years. There's no way we're descendents of your colony ship"  
Everyone in the room was staring at her. "But given the math adds up wrong for you to be descendents of us - well, the historians are going to go apeshit. I've never even heard of a planet called Kobol, but I'll look it up." The sheer shock in the room was like a physical force.

"But you said it was the Terran Federation," Roslyn said weakly, her beliefs crumbling. "The planet's got a lot of names. Earth was a common one for a while, but Terra won out."

Adama looked ready to have a heart attack. Lee looked shocked. Baltar was working his jaw, eyes darting around madly.

"Were you looking for Earth?" Reece put two and two together. "You were running to the only hope you had. And you found us." She put her head in her hands. "If that's right, we're almost going to have to admit you to the Federation, or at least make the offer. There's a particular ethic the military and a lot of civilians live by - we look after our own, and the President can't afford to lose too much support if she expects to get re-elected next year. The last election was far too close for her comfort." Reece leaned back against a console. "If you want to go to Earth, you probably could, eventually, but I've been there. It's so overpopulated it's not funny. You'd do better on some of our colonies."

She realised no one was really listening, and shut up and observed. It was like watching a Jew being told the Messiah was born at last.

**Author's note**: The name Terran Federation is a bit of a homage to a childhood love of Blake's 7.


	18. Politics

**Chapter 18: Politics**

Finally the babble died down. Lee stared at her, his heart in his throat. "You're really from Earth," he breathed.

"Not me personally, thank you," she seemed almost offended. "I was born on a planet called Siberia. I lived there until I was eighteen, when my family moved back to Midgard and I went into the Academy there."

He shook his head. "We spent ages hunting for Earth, pinning our hopes on it, and - well..."

"Here we are? It's not going to be that simple, Captain. Believe me."

"What do you mean?" Laura Roslyn asked.

"Politics," Reece rolled her eyes up. "Can you stand a bit of a dissertation on the subject?"

"Alright," she still looked shaken.

"We've been at war for nearly six hundred years, and the war started when the Kangas rolled into our solar system, destroyed all our settlements off Earth, nuked every major city and military facility they could hit and destroyed almost everything in orbit, whether it could shoot back or not. We lost four billion people in that attack. The second real attack they did, on Midgard, wiped out ninety-nine point eight percent of the planetary population. They considered that an unacceptably low kill rate." Her emotionless recital of these facts had the Colonials staring. "They've improved since. Now if they get even one light tender into near-atmospheric range, we can expect to lose everyone. They wiped out our colony on Marushka nine times. More than a billion dead in total."  
"We had worse," someone muttered.

"In terms of proportion of total people lost compared to survivors - quite probably. I'm not disputing it," Reece answered them without moving her attention from the little group around the table. "But over that time, the military acquired huge powers over commerce, industry, education, agriculture, exploration, scientific development, budgetary allocations - you can guess. Ever since the war finished, acts removing those powers have been shoved through as fast as our legal process allows, and very few of the elected officials have tried to seriously oppose them. So as soon as word gets into the news nets that we may have another war on our hands, the civilian officials are going to hit the roof and insist that the military not get any more powers and keep on giving up the ones they've got, the military are going to agitate to start increasing numbers again and try to get back into the state they were in when the war was still going, and there'll be accusations flying right left and centre." She paused. "For that matter, I'm willing to bet a lot of people will say the military somehow created this threat just to stay powerful. There's plenty of people silly or paranoid enough to believe it. With the election coming up soon, the President is going to be damned whichever side she comes down on, and all that's likely to leave you hanging in limbo until after the election at least, and quite possibly a lot longer than that."

"You can't do anything to expedite things?" Roslyn asked, feeling crushed. She couldn't wait that long. She wouldn't live that long.

"Not really. Our laws allow for acceptance of refugees, but there's a phrase in there somewhere about 'in so much as doing so does not compromise national security'. Which means that if accepting you as refugees means the Cylons will attack us, then I don't have the authority to do that. You'd have to go higher up - which leads to the problem of politics again. And just to make things really interesting, technically I'm obliged to deal with you as a separate nation, which means if you want to merge into our nation rather than just work out some kind of deal, you would lose your sovereignty."

Lee realised that maybe quoting President Roslyn's oath of office to Tamsin Reece had been a mistake. Reece was very good at laying things out.

"So what would your recommendation be?" Roslyn asked after a moment.

"Well, there's at least nine planets in this sector more or less fit for human habitation we haven't settled yet," she said after a moment. "Mostly because of travel time and the isolation. You could take one of those and settle, and ask for military aid. You could go further in, towards our central worlds, and find somewhere to settle there we haven't claimed and hope we would stop any Cylons simply to defend our own settlements. You could keep on moving and try to outrun the Cylons."

"We can't outrun them," Adama said heavily.

"Why not?" She asked. "You got this far."

He looked aside.

"You think they've got you infiltrated. They're not following - they're waiting." Her all-too-accurate assessment made Adama wince.

"How did you know that?" Baltar asked, admitting their dilemma without thought of the magnitude of the admission.

"A display of mass nervousness is a good indication something is wrong. The rest is just logic." She paused. "But when they came here, they went after us instead of you. So they're not perfect, or at least their field units don't have perfect intelligence. They don't have battle screens, or not as we use the term. And their scout vessels are about the size of our interceptors." She leaned back. "What's their fleet strength?"

"You mean, how many ships do they have? We don't know."

"Rough guess?"

"We've seen up to thirty basestars at a time."

"And a basestar is what size, with what armaments and what maneuverability?"

Lieutenant Gaida passed her over a manual they had put together for training new recruits. She paged through it, frowning and obviously working to put figures into terms she could relate to.

"So they're about the size of one of our cruisers, and pack less firepower than our destroyers but it's more spread out," she said calmly. "We can take them, although their fighters could be more than just a nuisance. We don't fly the kind of stubbies you need to take them ship-to-ship."

"Stubbies?" Tigh said.

"Terrible term, isn't it?" She grinned. "Came from a squadron recruited from a planet called Outback, settled almost entirely by people from Australia - a continent on Earth," she clarified. "And Australians tend to have their own brands of beer, slang and humour, not to mention poisonous everything that moves and a lot that doesn't. To them, stubbies are either very small fighter-craft, small bottles of beer or really short shorts. And the first meaning came last. They probably thought it was funny."

"When you say their own brand of humour…" Roslyn still looked wobbly.

"Their standard brand of sunhat has corks on strings hanging off the brim. They claim it knocks the flies out." She nodded at their looks. "I swear. The Australian version of a barometer is a piece of wood and a bit of string, and a set of instructions. If the string is dry, it's sunny. If it's wet, it's raining. If it's at an angle, it's windy. If it's at right angles, it's very windy. If the string is smoking, the house is on fire. If the string is missing, some bugger's flogged it. That's one of the more minor examples of an Australian sense of humour." She paused. "And it's rather off the topic."

"You think you can handle the Cylons?" Adama asked.

"Maybe. The problem isn't whether we can beat them - we probably can. The problem is whether we can beat them here. Avarin's a new, vulnerable colony, and the ships in orbit can handle themselves but they can't protect all the settlements. The people are pretty spread out, because it takes several years to condition the soil enough to get a decent crop so you need lots of land to start with if you plan to feed yourself. A nuke like they pack will barely make our destroyers shrug. It'll devastate a town." She sighed. "And Avarin's a lot better defended than our other colonies in the area, at that. If the Cylons go after one of them, we won't know about it until it's too late."


	19. Supplies to Spare

**Chapter 19: Supplies to spare**

That bitter statement caused silence around the table, but the people around the rest of the bridge were chattering softly to each other. Earth… Earth… Earth…

Tamsin shook her head. "What's the situation on your fleet? What kind of armaments, how many people..."

"Just under fifty thousand people," Roslyn said. "That's all there is left. The Galactica is the only ship that's armed."

"And supplies?"

"We're running low on everything," Adama said heavily.

"I can imagine," She said.

"No, you can't," Tigh said.

She stared at him pointedly. "You've never heard of El Alamo, I suppose? It's a planet about thirty light-years out from Stella Nova, where we base one of our fleets. During the war, it was blockaded for a year and half just after we'd put more than fifty thousand troops into there to augment the hundred thousand already there. We had supplies for two months. Eighteen months later, the blockade was broken and the supplies came in again. I was there, working with the wounded and fighting at least once every week. We spent most of our time getting one small meal a day and never mind what kind of hours we were working or if we'd been fighting. It was a _good_ day when we could eat rat. Medical supplies ran so low it became quite normal to take the seriously wounded and offer them a quick death because we had no painkillers at all. Most of them said yes." Her face was utterly, horribly blank and her tone was deadly flat. "There were less than twenty-five thousand of us left alive when the blockade was lifted, but we held the base. Oh, yes, Colonel. I can imagine your supply situation quite well. At least none of you are starving to death yet."

"Why didn't you surrender?" Gaida asked, a little intimidated.

"To the Kangas?" Reece snorted. "You've never fought them. When you fight the Kangas, you save the last shot for yourself. Being captured alive is the worst thing imaginable. Giving mercy to your comrades is mild in comparison. I've seen what they do to their prisoners. We never surrender, Lieutenant. _Never_."

She looked around the table. "Well, that killed the conversation, didn't it?" She asked, almost mercurial in how cheerful she became suddenly.

"Yes," Lee Adama said, fumbling for words.

"Sorry. It's - a sore point with me. I've never known anything but war. It's one reason I didn't leave when my term of service was up. I've forgotten what it's like to be a civilian." She shrugged awkwardly. "Now, with regard to supplies, we can probably find quite a bit of food, water, medical supplies and the like - that falls under the heading of humanitarian aid, and we're not only inclined to help that way but under standing orders to do so. I'll need to talk to the Admiral and our quartermaster, and talk with your doctors to compare what kind of medical supplies you use - there's no point in, oh, providing drugs to treat diseases you don't have, for example."

"Speaking of which, are you likely to get sick?" Roslyn asked. "I don't know much about medicine, but the threat of cross-contamination..."

"We don't need to lose any more people," Tigh rumbled. "And we don't have enough medicines to treat an epidemic."

"I've got a very active immune system," Reece said with an odd secretive smile. "I couldn't catch a disease if I tried. I've never so much as had a cold."

"That's impossible," Baltar said.

"No, not really," Reece contradicted. "Just useful. Don't worry. I'll talk to your doctors eventually, but disease is one thing I don't have to worry about giving or getting." Lee got the distinct sense she wasn't telling the whole truth.

"That would be most useful, Captain Reece," Roslyn said. "But these supplies..."

"You need them, but you don't want to be beholden to us?" Reece asked. "No, it's alright. I understand better than you might think. We usually keep large stores of such things on hand anyway - that's a legacy of the war, having emergency supplies. We can spare some. Although actually, I think what you need more than supplies is a means of being self-sustaining. Right?"

"Yes. We're not producing half of what we use."

"It's a classic economical problem in establishing colonies," Reece nodded. "Better minds than mine have written books about it many times. Below a certain population level it's hard to maintain a high level of technology and you've got all sorts of other things to worry about and run down your resources as well." She paused, staring off into space. "Just out of curiosity, when the Cylons destroyed your colonies, exactly how did they do it?"

**Author's note: I promise, there are longer chapters and some decent battles coming soon. Sorry the updates are so far apart, but life and making a living keeps getting in the way.**


	20. You expect to die

**Chapter 20: You expect to die**

Baltar was giving a stuttering recital of his conclusions about the Cylons infiltrating the defence network that was making Tamsin very suspicious when Duella noticed something on her screen. "Unknown signal approaching," she said.

Baltar broke off his rambling dissertation as Adama and Reece darted over to look. Tigh reached for a ship-phone in case they needed to declare an alert. "What is that?" Adama asked. The signature was barely detectible, strangely skewed… nothing he'd ever seen before.

"Wait a moment." Reece fished in her bag and pulled out a one-piece microphone and earpiece with several buttons along the edge. She tapped one. "Reece to…" She broke off mid-sentence. "How many and where?" Roslyn and Adama swapped looks. "Are they definitely… Right. What about… oh. How bad?" Whatever she heard made her face tighten. "Alright. I'll pass that along. Guess that sorts out which side we're on. How long?" She nodded to herself. "I'll tell them. Wait a moment." She pulled the earpiece out and held it in one hand. "The Cylons hit one of our terraforming outposts in the Valandis system. There's nothing left. There's a large fleet of them heading this way from out-system, probably about fifty big ships and all their support groups. The Admiral wants your fleet to accompany the fighter escort she's sending us to get you away from Avarin. She's going to call for battleship support to rendezvous with us at Gurconda Prime. That strange signal is our interceptor squadron. They'll be here in a few minutes."

"Why should we move? We're still low on supplies," Roslyn said.

"What Admiral Fenway is trying to do is get you away from Avarin. She's assigned to protect the colony - and she will, but the Cylons are after you. And you have more information about them than we do, far more information. We need to preserve that information." Reece paused for a moment. "Besides, Gurconda Prime can accommodate fifty thousand new arrivals overnight - it's a major military training post for these five sectors, and they're used to shuffling entire brigades through retraining on short notice. It's also the most heavily defended position in the sector. If you're not safe there, then we can't keep you safe anywhere you can go."

"Not even at Earth?" Adama asked.

"You'd never get there," Reece said. "Not unless your ships all have far better engines than I expect they do. You've been on the run for months, maybe a year or two by our clock, running hard - I know what that does to ships without a chance for proper maintenance, and we build even our civilian cargo ships to take the kind of strain war puts on engines. We've been at this longer than you, after all." There was no sting in her voice; she was all business. "And Earth is a long way off. I guess it boils down to whether you want to live, or not."

"You can't fight the Cylons?" Tigh asked heavily.

Reece snorted humourlessly. "Oh, sure. And two destroyers against fifty of those base-stars, we'd last maybe twenty minutes. The colony would be gone long before then. Oh, and you'd be debris as well, of course."

"Fifty big ships? You're sure about that figure?" Adama asked. The ships certainly weren't on the Galactica's scopes.

"They are," Reece said grimly, meaning her comrades in arms. "Now, are you going to get moving, or not? I've got a very grumpy admiral waiting to hear your verdict."

Adama and Roslyn locked gazes across the length of the bridge.

"We go," she decided.

He nodded. "We go."

Reece put the earpiece back in. "That's a go, Admiral. We'll get moving as fast as we can. You hang on out here." There was silence for a moment. "Well, it's in the lap of fate now. Pleasure serving with you, Istia." She listened for a moment. "Thanks, sir. Good luck. Reece out."

"That sounded like a good-bye," Roslyn said.

Reece snorted. "I've known Istia most of her life. Served with her for years. That's how we always used to part when things were at war, when life spans were short - you always said that it had been a pleasure serving with your friends, when you parted. In case you never met again. Occasionally you said other things - but that's the tradition."

"You expect to die?" Tigh asked. They did not need a suicidal foreign diplomat.

"No, I expect Admiral Fenway to die. And she knows it. She also knows we're back in a war, and most of the crews will have been listening to that conversation because it's about the only entertainment going. They'll have heard that, and all but the youngest will remember. Gets them thinking the right way. So will anyone who picks up the recordings we're broadcasting back to the inner colonies. We'll need that. A lot of people just won't want to admit how serious this is. There's too many people who don't want another war."

**Author's note: No offense intended to Australians. I'm related to some, they'd take it very badly if I insulted their nation. I certainly prefer the Australian sense of humour to the American one.  
More chapters soon, I promise.**


	21. We don't have all day, you know

**Chapter 21: We don't have all day, you know**

"We'd better set course for Gurconda Prime," Tamsin Reece said.

"Where's Gurconda Prime?" Lieutenant Gaida asked.

She froze. "Oh, bugger. Hold on a moment. Lieutenant Duella, can you get me a line to the fighter closest to the _Galactica_? That'll be the squadron leader."

"One moment." She did so. Tamsin took the proffered comset with a nod of thanks.

"Lebeau, you hear me?"

"Loud and clear, Reece. What have you fallen into this time?"

"Tell you later."

"That you will, Tamsin. What's up?"

"If I read you off some coordinates for recognisable stars, can you figure out the navigational system and translate Gurconda Prime into a coordinate set for me?"

"It's worth a try. Reel them off." Tamsin held a hand out for the _Galactica_'s navigational charts, and didn't get them. She sighed. "Look, our coordinate systems are totally useless to you. I can't just point and say 'it's thataway', and this is the simplest solution. I only need a few stars to work from."

Gaida looked at Adama. He waited several seconds before nodding. The navigational charts were handed over.

"You'll need to know which stars are which," he said. "Our names will be meaningless."

"I just need a few unusual ones that I can recognise. I know Avarin's night sky very well, and I know my stellar navigation. Captain LeBeau has the stellar database for the entire galaxy in her navigational software so she can use these stars as fixed points in space to work out a system for translating the coordinates. I could probably do it myself if I really tried, but doing this at high speed is a bit out of my league." She flicked through the charts and read off coordinates at high speed, referencing a blue giant, a brown dwarf and three binary systems as well as the Avarin solar system.

"You got that?"

"Yeah. Got the system, too. It's a twist on the old system the Yanks used to use back when they were still running things out of NORAD - late twenty-first century old. They've just changed the origin reference point, that's all. Used to be Terra, not some planet way out on a different spiral arm. Probably their home planet. One moment. Got a pen?" Gaida was looking distinctly insulted.

"Reel it off." She jotted it down on the edge of a chart before tossing the paper back.

"Who were the Yanks?" Duella asked. "What kind of a name is that?"

" 'Yankee' was a slang term for people from the United States of America. NORAD was their military control facility for the Air Force and Space Corps, underneath Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado Springs. The Kangas hit it with a very effective nuke"  
"Underground facilities usually survive nuclear attacks, if they're deep enough," Adama said in a tone that implied poor design. "Oh, most of it survived - but the exit shafts didn't, and so neither did the air shafts. We never found out whether they starved, suffocated or died of dehydration - in six hundred years we've never bothered to dig them out. But they kept broadcasting weak signals through a few intact wire aerials for a while, and then they stopped but the power didn't, and we knew they were dead." She shrugged. "Rescuing a bunch of buried dying people wasn't too high a priority in the face of picking up the pieces after a nuclear strike on almost all of America's major cities. The Kangas plastered one side ofTerra much worse than the other, and America took the brunt of the attack."

"These coordinates make for a long jump, sir," Gaida said. "The longest we've ever done."

"Well, it is a fair hop," Tamsin acknowledged. "But it's also the most heavily defended spot in the sector."

"Work it out, Lieutenant," Gaida was told.

"Do the tables even cover that?" One yeoman asked quietly as Tamsin flicked through the charts, frowning as if something was teasing at her memory.

"I'll calculate the jump, sir," Gaida said, "Then disperse coordinates to the fleet."

"Heellooo!" Captain LeBeau called over the com. "I do so hate to sound grumpy, Tamsin, but could you please get these people moving? We don't have all day, you know."

Tamsin sighed and took the com back off Duella. "Trace, do me a big favour, please."

"What?"

"Shut up for a bit." She handed the phone back. "If she starts to rant, feel free to tell her to stuff it. I doubt she'll be really offended."

Roslyn raised an eyebrow. "You don't think so?"

"I know Trace very well - since I was twelve, in fact. Very good fighter pilot and all the tact of a bull in a china shop. She'll wait while we sort this out… Sweet mother of Christ, you work out the jump vectors on _paper_?"

"Well, we can't use computers," Gaida said. "The _Galactica_'s computers aren't networked."

"Why on Earth not? If you know how..."

"The, ah, the Cylons infiltrated our computer networks." Baltar looked almost ashamed. Roslyn noted the phrase 'why on Earth not'.

"By sabotage, right? So why cripple your ship-wide computers if the circumstances are unlikely to be repeated? I mean, wouldn't you notice a walking hardware shop roaming the ship and borrowing computer terminals?"

"_Galactica_ dates back to the first Cylon Wars," Lee Adama explained. "Back then, not networking the computers was the only way to keep them secure. The Cylons infiltrated all the integrated networks, so we got rid of them. The Second Cylon War…" He fought to keep his face calm. "The _Galactica_'s the only ship that survived long enough for it to really matter."

"Well, we network our computers all over the place, and the Cylons got nowhere. What kind of firewall programs did you use?" She caught Baltar's gaze. "Anti-hacking programs? Shunt routines? Protection algorithms? Please tell me you've at least heard of these things?" Baltar's mouth opened and shut soundlessly. Tamsin banged her head on the table and, with remarkable tact, changed the subject. "Why do you need that batch of equations?" She asked Gaida. "Alright, my math classes were a long way back, but I don't remember seeing that section in there."

He frowned. "I'm trying to work this out." Reece took the hint but kept flipping through the sheets. "Trace," She took the phone back, "Remind me again - Takeshita's Fourth Theory..."

"Who's Takeshita?" Lee asked as a bunch of equations that were absolutely meaningless to all the Colonials in the room came over the speakers. Baltar grabbed for some paper and started scribbling.

"Got it," Reece said, comparing the Colonial jump tables and her scribbles with practiced ease. "Right. I think I just proved it wrong."

"WHAT!" Everyone wearing an earphone winced.

"If I'm reading this right, these people use a totally different drive system. They never discovered..."

"Then how can we keep together..."

"We'll just have to improvise..."

"Crud, give me two seconds…"The two of them talked right over the top of each other, not bothering to finish their sentences.

"What are you talking about?" Commander Adama asked.  
"Takeshita's Fourth Theory dealt with the impossibility of quantum teleportation in a linear universe. Problem is, your jump tables use equations that prove that theory wrong."

"How else can you achieve FTL travel?" Tigh asked.

"We use multi-dimensional drives. Basically you shift into dimensions where everything is much closer together - oh, hell, that's a really lousy explanation. I'll give you the maths later, but it took me five years to wrap my head around them so you may need some time. Unfortunately it also means we'll have a really interesting time trying to escort the fleet anywhere - and half our missiles… oh shit." She grabbed the phone. "Trace, stow all the MDMs. They'll be like blank warheads."

"Shit. That's half our armaments."

"MDMs?"

"Multi-dimensional missiles. They disrupt drive fields. One of those can take out even the biggest capital ships. And if the Cylons use the same drive principles you do, they're next to useless now." She paused. "Unless - you got much in the way of nuclear warheads I could borrow? Preferably deuterium-based fusion ones. I might be able to improvise something - there's one modification we tried before that might work..."

"You use nuclear warheads on your fighter craft?" Roslyn looked stunned.

"Well, of course. What else would we use? They're good for light tactical missiles. The heavier stuff is different, of course. For those you want something big."

The entire bridge was staring at her as if she were a different species, and she seemed totally oblivious. Reece shrugged. "What? Kangas take a lot of killing, and we didn't plan to lose."

**Author's note: It's finally here, a longer chapter! About time, too. Much guilt here.**


	22. Warheads and War Stories

Chapter 22: Warheads and war stories

The suited figures in red sank down onto the edge of the landing pod, towing missiles like they were paperclips. The missiles were nearly as large as the Vipers.  
Chief Tyrrol stared in astonishment at the assortment of figures. All clearly human, mostly tall, and as they shucked their helmets it became clear that youth was evidently a major selection factor for the Terran fighter crews.  
More than thirty missiles lay on the floor of the bay by then; Lee Adama, Colonel Tigh and Tamsin Reece were just arriving.  
"Captain," he nodded. "Colonel, ah"  
"Captain Tamsin Reece," she introduced herself. "Sorry to muck up your landing bay like this. We'll have this whole shebang out of here as soon as we can switch the warheads over, I promise"  
"Good. Anything we can do to help"  
"Got any spare nukes that aren't in inventory?" She asked rhetorically before staring across the bay, sticking two fingers in her mouth and giving a piercing whistle.  
One of the figures loped across. Taller, with browner hair and a plainer face, but there could be no doubt of the similarity of features. "Gentlemen, this is Captain Trace LeBeau, commander of this squadron. Trace, Colonel Saul Tigh, the ship's XO, Captain Lee Adama, their fighter squadron commander, although they use CAG "  
"Commander Air Group? That designation went out round about the time the US started letting women serve at sea"  
"Shut up. And Master Chief Tyrrol, who is the head of their deck crew, please try not to piss him off." LeBeau began to open her mouth. "I mean it, Trace"  
"Yes, sir," LeBeau rolled her eyes up. "And if you stuck a broom up my arse I could probably sweep the floor, too"  
"Do you have a broom handy, Chief Tyrrol?" Reece asked in a perfectly calm and level tone. The Chief hunted desperately for something to say.  
"That was a joke, Tamsin"  
"Right now, Trace, it's really not very funny. Start swapping out the warheads, alright"  
"Fine, but where do we put them?" She asked. "I can hardly pile those things in a corner, Tamsin, they weigh half a ton apiece"  
"Better question, how do we move them?" Tyrrol asked. "Or even get the missiles back out of the bay? Our loaders aren't designed for those loads. Or that shape." "The old-fashioned way, Chief. Come on. Miller! Hong, Sampson, Tanachra, you three get on that end. Tamsin, take that side, Miller, the other…" LeBeau waved her arms around like semaphore flags and her squad leaped where she pointed. In front of their astonished eyes, six people lifted a missile that would have taken the entire deck crew to budge. Even more curious, LeBeau carried one end all on her own with ludicrous ease.  
"Like that?" She asked mildly.  
"Er." Tyrrol hunted for words. "Well, that's… convenient"  
"You'll get used to it," she said almost kindly. "Sampson"  
"Start stripping the panels and disconnecting things, I know, I know. I wasn't born yesterday, Captain," the chubby dark man with a pronounced Liverpool accent grinned. A curious Cally stepped up. "You know what you're doing?" She came up to his armpits. "I've never seen anything like this before"  
"You kidding? I grew up fixing things. This is old home week for me, my parents owned a house next door to an ammunition dump. I got to play with some of the stuff where the actual munitions had been removed, sometimes"  
"Only in England," Tamsin rolled her eyes up. "Where's England?" Tyrrol asked.  
"Northern hemisphere, part of one of the islands off the European seaboard between the Atlantic and the Baltic Seas," he said. "And in my opinion, the only place on the planet that's still got a sense of humour. Except possibly Australia"  
"Which planet's that?" Cally clambered up next to him to watch as he flipped open a panel and started punching in a code to deactivate the safety mechanisms.  
"Earth, of course," he said. Lee, watching Tamsin, saw her wince. "There's only one England, after all. Can you hold this back, please, lass? Alright, what's wrong"  
"To them, Earth is a bit like Atlantis to us," Tamsin remarked mildly. "And they've spent about a thousand years hearing how their long-lost brethren settled there"  
"Not bloody likely, we've been around far longer than that. Hell, a thousand years ago would have been – well, it's 2856 now, so that'd be during the reign of Queen Victoria the First"  
"Steam engines were high-tech then," Trace noted. "Got everything"  
"Huh? Oh, sure. Here, take this, lass," he pushed a large sphere with wires coming out of it into Cally's cringing hands. "That's the detonator guard. Give me ten minutes, I'll have this out and we can swap in whatever we're going to use." He paused. "What are we going to use"  
Tyrrol looked at Captain Reece. She motioned to Captain LeBeau, who pulled out what looked like a sheet of paper with the bottom half printed as a keyboard. She put it on the floor and started typing, and he realised it was a computer terminal. As thin as a bit of tin foil.  
"Standard MDM warhead, right? What you do is…" For all his technical expertise Tyrrol had no idea what she was talking about for the next three minutes. Finally she finished with, "and that forms an implosion centre in here, which we fill with the radioactives they use for fuel and that gives us a rather crude fission warhead"  
"Bloody hell," Sampson remarked. "Never even knew that was possible. Ever tried this before"  
"Yeah, but I don't know if worked"  
"What?" Tyrrol asked.  
"Why not?" Lee Adama asked.  
Tamsin shrugged. "We tried it at R'Shok to increase our warhead yield. Problem was that no one in a position to take notes survived the battle. Worst casualty rates of any battle we ever won, that battle was"  
"You're that Tamsin Reece?" One of the other pilots, an Asian woman who looked ludicrously young to be in uniform at all, said incredulously. "I thought you were dead"  
"I don't die that easily"  
"Where's R'Shok?" Cally asked, stuttering a bit.  
"Other side of occupied space. The Kangas had a very large set of battle stations in orbit over R'Shok Six, where they had all their weapons manufacturing capacity for the sector, and we had to take it out. Only the only forces that could be spared for the strike were borderline for being enough to win even with every advantage in our favour. Basically it was a suicide run"  
"How bad was it?" Cally asked.  
"We sent seventy-four thousand, six hundred and twenty-four people in. Afterwards there were seventy-four thousand, six hundred and twenty-three funerals to hold. But we took out the Kangas." Tamsin shrugged, her eyes fixed on a point far, far away. "I've always wondered if it was worth it." She walked over to help lift another missile into the bay.  
"Who was the survivor?" Tigh asked Sampson as he worked. "What happened to him"  
"Tamsin? She'd been the strike leader for the fighter squadrons – she was a colonel back then. She spent six months in a psychiatric ward on suicide watch, and then she left the interceptor corps and trained for the Marine Corps Heavy Raider insertion teams, which is about as far from fighter piloting as you can get. She got the Fleet Distinguished Service Medal and the Solarian Grand Cross, and didn't get back in a fighter cockpit for a very long time. Hasn't flown in combat since." He shrugged. "Pity, really. After LeBeau told me she used to fly I hunted up her service record. She was one of the best fighter pilots who ever lived. Arguably the best at commanding squadrons in battle. I've always wondered why she volunteered for the run at R'shok. None of the guys who went expected to come back. Pass me the spanner, would you"  
"Hey, Sampson!" A skinny short man with a red spot tattooed on his forehead yelled. "What's the deal with this lot"  
"'Scuse me," He nodded politely to the Galactica crew. "I'm the top ESO in the squadron, so this is my problem. Chief, those fissionables of yours"  
"We can't handle them safely, the equipment's on one of the fleet ships"  
"We'll improvise," he said. "If nothing else, our suits are damn near impervious to radioactivity. Push comes to shove, we can just do it with gloved hands." His lips twitched. "And to think I thought this posting would be boring"  
"SAMPSON!" LeBeau bellowed. "STOP CHATTING THE LADY UP AND GET OVER HERE"  
He tipped an imaginary cap to Cally and tossed his spanner to someone else to finish the job. "No tact, that woman," he muttered, talking about his CO. "No tact at all." 


	23. Holdups and Press Conferences

**Chapter 23: Hold-ups and press conferences**

"Commander, three ships still report engine problems," Duella told him. "They can't jump until they've found the faults."

"I take it that's the hold-up?" Reece said urbanely as they walked back in. Tigh had opted to stay behind in the landing bay and try to help. Tamsin had rolled her eyes up and said, "Dear Lord, Tigh and Trace together? I should be able to hear the explosions a parsec away."

"Yes," President Roslyn said. "I won't leave my people behind. The fleet's ready to go otherwise, but..."

"The pace of a fleet is the pace of the slowest ship. It's an age-old problem. Anything we can do to help?"

"No, thank you," Commander Adama said. "How's it going down in the landing pod?"

"They should be done in less than an hour," she said. "Altering the warheads – or swapping them out, when we've got spares to put in – isn't so much time-consuming as tedious. It won't take long to put them back in the racks, either; they were designed to be loaded, unloaded and checked quickly. Sometimes we have to re-arm in a hurry."

"What about your pilots?" Adama asked. "Won't they need to take a break?"

"No," Reece shook her head. "Our suits have food, water and sanitary facilities built in, and if someone needs to sleep one of the crew can go to sleep while the other keeps watch. I think the record for living in a fighter that was functional is about six months, doing that. They'll be fine, it's what they're trained for." Lee Adama remembered Sampson's revelation that Reece was a former fighter pilot; presumably she had done the same on previous occasions. It was hard to imagine her flying, but he could imagine her giving orders in a battle.

"What about you?" He asked. "When was your last meal?"

"Yesterday. Oh, don't worry about me. I can go for days without eating or sleeping if I need to. You get a lot of practice as a combat surgeon."

He looked at her, eyebrows raised. "You sound like my father."

"So long as you don't start sounding like mine, that's alright with me."

"What's your father do?" Roslyn asked.

"At the moment he's doing work evaluating computer software for farm management. He's worked in computers most of his life."

"And your mother?"

"She used to be a professional gambler, but now she only does that part-time, when she gets bored. Mostly she's a professor of classical literature." Tamsin's lips twitched. "She sometimes jokes that at her age, she is a classic, so she's well suited to her subject."

"You have any brothers or sisters?"

"Trace is my foster-sister – she lived with us for six years, and we went through high school and the academy together. I was one of eight kids, four older and three younger. All boys, worse luck."

Lee remembered his brother Zack with pain. "What do they do? Are they military as well, or civilians?"

Reece looked totally blank. "Neither," she said. "They're all dead."

Billy Keikeya came up to the bridge at that point. "Madam President?" He was holding a piece of paper in his hands. Roslyn talked to him for a moment, and then she sighed and slumped a little, taking her glasses off and rubbing her eyes before reading it.

Tamsin watched her carefully.

"Something wrong?" Lee asked.

"How long has she had cancer?" Tamsin asked softly.

"What?" He looked at her in shock.

"I usually batch up vacuum-freeze and battle injuries, oncology's not my field, but I can recognise the symptoms when I see them." She looked at him. "You didn't know?"

"No." He opened his mouth and shut it. "She's never said anything."

"Ah. In that case, I shan't either without good reason."

"You won't?"

"I believe it falls under the heading of doctor-patient confidentiality." Her lips twitched. "Even if I'm not actually her doctor."

"Oh. Thanks." He tried to convince himself she was wrong. "How long have you been a doctor for, anyway?"

Her brow furrowed for a moment. "Ugn – since El Alamo, minus seven – ah, seventy-three years since I got my degree, give or take a few months. I don't pay much attention to the dates any more."

He stared at her. "Seventy-three years?"

"Nice to know I don't look my age any more," She grinned toothily and moved back to the plotting table as Roslyn came back looking tired. "Is something wrong?"

"There's a sort of council, an elected representative from every ship, and they're demanding to know what's going on."

"How do you usually handle it?" Tamsin asked. "I mean, just give them a newsletter, talk to each one, hold a meeting, what?"

"Usually we hold a meeting and they ask questions."

"A press conference," Tamsin said a little incredulously. Roslyn nodded. "Christ. Can't we get away from reporters anywhere?" She slumped back into a bulk-head, rubbing her face. "Alright. I'd better talk to them, then."

"No, that's my job."

"No, it's got to be me. For one thing, I can answer their questions. For another – do you have communications between the ships that isn't completely minimalist? I mean, people have time to chat?"

"Yes," Adama couldn't see where she was going.

"Trace is a truly brilliant fighter pilot, almost unmatched in the interceptor corps, but the only way to get her to stop gossiping is to wire her mouth shut and maybe not even then. I'll bet that within ten minutes of her setting foot on this ship half the deck crew knew we were from Earth, and if you don't do some damage control soon the rumours are going to be flying like shit at a political debate." Roslyn had been taking a sip of water as Tamsin said the last sentence, and she choked in laughter at the unexpectedly accurate description. Billy pounded her back hard to let her breathe again. "So someone's going to have to talk to them. Better to make it me – you're going to have your hands full when we get to Gurconda, but there'll be plenty of trained diplomats to take the load off my shoulders. You won't have that. Besides, you simply don't know enough about us to really answer questions."

She and Billy swapped looks.

"It's a good idea, Madam President," he said quietly.

"Alright. You know how to handle a press conference?"

"I've taken them before."

"You have?" Commander Adama asked in surprise.

"Yeah. Back before we finished up the war, I was stationed for a while on a planet called New Hebrides. It was a major rejuvenation centre, which back then meant we got people with, oh, severed limbs, needing new organs, shattered bones, severe nerve damage, brain damage, that sort of thing. People who needed substantial work and a lot of specialists before they'd be fit to fight again. The military built a big hospital there, and I worked in administration there for a while. I had to take a few press conferences in the process."

"How long is 'a few years'?" Billy asked suspiciously. Tamsin figured he was trying to spare his President's energy by making sure Tamsin knew what she was doing.

"It was a three-year assignment. I left thirty-four years and three promotions later."

"Thirty-four years," He said. "You don't look thirty-four years old. Twenty-nine at most."

"You're off by three and a quarter," Tamsin said, reading the piece of paper he had brought Roslyn as Roslyn slid it across the table to her.

"Years?"

"Centuries."

"You're three hundred and fifty-four years old?" Lee said incredulously.

"Yes," Tamsin said. "I'd guess your years are maybe ten percent longer than ours, but no more than that."

"No one lives that long," Billy said.

"The record is six hundred and eighty-three, and she's still alive."

"I find that hard to believe," William Adama tried to figure out what she could be trying to gain by saying that.

"You can ask her. Her name is Tanya Emerson, she's a professor at the University of New Francisco on Midgard, she's married to a computer systems analyst, she lives on a small farm and owns several sheep, and she has several hundred children."

"You know her?" Lee asked in surprise. It sounded like she did.

"Very well. She's my mother. She's also one of maybe a thousand people alive who are still old enough to remember Earth before the Kangas bombed it. Talking to her is kind of strange if you don't actually know that."

"Six hundred and eighty-three," Roslyn said incredulously. "How can you live so long? How can you be over three hundred?"

"Nothing's killed me yet," Tamsin said. "It seems absolutely wonderful at first glance. I didn't learn differently until a bit after my hundredth birthday. Then I got a crash course in why it really, truly sucks to live a long time. I've never forgotten that."

"Why? What happened?" Lee asked.

"My daughter died." Her lips twitched. "The guy who said time heals all wounds was either lying through his teeth or didn't know what the hell he was on about."

**Author's note: Finally! New chapter! More coming, I promise.**


	24. Getting Ready to Go

**Chapter 24: Getting ready to go**

"Madam President?" Duella looked up. "The _Heart of Picon_ reports they'll be ready to jump in half an hour."

"What's wrong?" Commander Adama asked Tamsin, who was listening to hear earpiece again and looking miserable.

"Avarin Three just dropped out of communications after a burst of encrypted transmissions. Odds are the Cylons destroyed the colony." Tamsin looked furious as well as miserable now.

"Were you there long?" Roslyn asked. No one seemed to know what to say.

"Five and a half years," Tamsin said. "A nice quiet posting, after the war. Trace getting stationed there as well was just a bonus. There was a very nice orthodontist at the hospital planetside who kept trying to ask me out, and one of the orderlies on the _Alabama_ was a thirty-seventh generation military medic and proud of it. I'd served with six of the preceding generations. When Admiral Fenway was a little girl, I baby-sat for her. Her great-great-grandmother Inola Fenway was one of the best platoon sergeants I ever had in the Marine Corps, and she died at Yaruna Six saving my life. Her daughter Needra, Istia's aunt, saved my life at El Alamo, and lost both legs in the process. It took seven surgeons to put them back after we'd cloned her new ones. Istia had a daughter and two granddaughters on Avarin. Her daughter settled there after she mustered out of the Logistics Corps. Istia was going to retire there in a few years when her twenty years service were up, and spend her time training dogs and horses and spoiling her grandchildren rotten." Reece was totally still and remote. "Every time I think I've hit the limit for how many friends I can stand to lose and still stay sane, something comes along to prove me wrong. I'm getting very, very sick of it."

Roslyn had no idea what to say to that, but she had to do something. "Will they be here in half an hour?"

"If they're anything like the Kangas, they'll take the time to totally pulverise the planet and make sure there are no survivors. If they're not, or if they want to split their forces, they'll come after us at top speed. How fast is that, exactly?"

"They'll be here in less than half an hour," Adama said without bothering to figure it.

"Alright," Tamsin said. "Here's what we do. We split the fleet. All the ships ready to go jump out right now, and our fighters go with them. I'll give Trace recognition codes for each ship to broadcast so our ships won't regard them as hostile invaders and shoot before asking questions. The ones that can't jump stay here with the Galactica, and join the rest of the fleet when they can."

"I don't know if all the ships have enough engine power to make it to Gurconda," Gaida said.

"We can do it in leaps. Can you work out a sequence of jumps they can handle?"

"Yes, but..."

"Do it. I'll tell Trace to hurry up and get that mess out of your landing bay, then President Roslyn and I can give your reporters the run-down, I'll have it broadcast to all your ships so everyone knows what's up. The Galactica and the ships that need repairs can follow along as soon as possible. It's the best way to get as many people as possible to safety as fast as possible while not causing a shitload of panic and upheaval."

Roslyn raised an eyebrow. "Did you ever think of running for office?"

"I have some dignity, thank you," Tamsin said briskly. "Let's get going. I'll go have a word with Trace and tell her to hurry up."

"One, ah, one question," Baltar said. "You said your fighters don't, don't travel in space the way our ships do..."

"No, but this is the best we can do. If the jumps are the right length…" She grabbed Gaida's charts out of his hand and marked two points. "About this length… we should be able to catch up within a few minutes."

"In a few minutes the Cylons could massacre the entire fleet," he said.

"Well, they almost certainly will if they catch us here," Tamsin said. "There's only so many fighters, even counting yours, and our fighters aren't designed or equipped for holding a blockade or even a defensive perimeter of this size. We can take out some of the capital ships, maybe all of them if we're superbly lucky, but we can't keep the fighters off your backs, we can't stop their ordinance getting through, we can't even guarantee we'll survive the experience ourselves. Quantity has a quality all of its own." She looked around. "Anyone got a better idea? Please, no cracks about last stands. I've been in a few and they suck."

"You're alive, aren't you?" Gaita asked.

"Yeah, but I wasn't on the losing side," she said. "Last stands are just a way of dying dramatically. I prefer living, dramatically or otherwise."

Roslyn and Adama looked at each other. "I'll go with the first wave of the fleet," she said. "One of us has to."

Reece nodded. "Which group do you want me with?"

"This one," Adama said.

"You think we might betray you? Well, fair enough, you don't even know us. But where's this press conference?"

"_Colonial One_," Roslyn said. "One of the passenger ships in the fleet."

"Guess I'm in for a few shuttle rides, huh?" Reece said. "Or I can just hop out an airlock and use suit jets on the way back. Wouldn't be the first time I've done something like that. Whatever works best."

"We'll sort something out," Roslyn said. "But my people will want to know what's going on."

"Yes, and God knows what sort of chaos we'll get if someone does something stupid. I certainly don't want to."

Adama looked at her. "How good are your fighter squadron? The people, not the ships.  
"  
"Maybe a third rookies, little or no combat experience but good training, since towards the end of the war and the last few years the training program wasn't compressed. The rest are combat veterans looking for somewhere quiet to finish out their terms. Trace knows how to assign wingmen to protect the newbies until they've learned how to survive, and how to keep them steady. She's hopeless past squadron level, but at squadron level she's good and slightly short of brilliant. As a pilot herself, she is brilliant. No question. All the crews have been in the squadron long enough to have practiced working together, and the interceptors themselves are solid, if a little out of date. To be honest, I'm more worried about her attitude towards civilians than I am about her command ability. Like I said, she's really bad at tact. But if anyone can manage this battle with what we've got, she can. They'll do their jobs."

Adama nodded slowly. "Go."

"Right." Roslyn set a pace down to the shuttle bay that had Billy scurrying along behind, and Tamsin fumbling to get Trace moving and the missiles restowed ready to use while searching for things in her bag.

"Something wrong?"

"I've only got everyday uniforms and surgical scrubs that are fit to wear. My dress uniform looks like it got stored underneath an earthquake."

"Go with what you've got," Roslyn said. "I hold press conferences dressed like this."

"How'd you end up with this job?" Reece asked. "Most politicians I've met are a lot less pleasant than you."

"After the attack on the Colonies, I became first in line of succession." Roslyn tried not to think about what would happen when she died. There was no real line of succession after her.

"Where did you start?"

"I was the secretary of education," she said after a moment. "Forty-third in line."

"I've seen worse. When America got nuked when the Kangas first attacked, the entire cabinet, the vice president and the joint chiefs of staff were all in military bases that got bombed. The president died when the small town he had been evacuated to got swamped by a tidal wave from a Kanga warship that crashed into the sea close to that coastline, and all six of the surviving senators out of the hundred they had to start with were in areas with no means of long-distance communication for several days. The White House and the Capitol, not to mention the entire city of Washington, became one big crater which took out most of the elected representatives and the executive staff. The presidency fell to the chief of staff of the President's wife, who was in a hospital in Bethesda on maternity leave. Oddly enough, she turned out to be phenomenal at it. Her name was Ellen Richards. Without her, America would have fallen to pieces in a day. She's generally acknowledged as the greatest president America ever had. She ended up directing a major recovery initiative while giving birth, which is great devotion to duty in the book of anyone who's ever had children." She paused. "You ever had children?"

"No. Never."

"Pity. Mine are some of the best things that ever happened to me."

Roslyn opened her mouth to ask a question and the sirens went off.

"Action stations. Action stations. Set condition one throughout the ship. Action stations. Action stations. Set condition one throughout the ship."

The two women swapped looks and ran for the bridge. Billy was left struggling to keep up amid the throngs of people bolting to their posts.


	25. A Quick Battle

**Chapter 25: A Quick Battle**

"This is not good," Trace muttered. "SAMPSON!"

"We're moving, we're moving." On board the _Galactica_, the landing pod deployed. Sampson nodded politely to Cally before she ran off to see to the Vipers, and he and the others bolted out into the bay.

"Shit," he said with feeling as they manhandled the last missile out, burning their suit jets at max.

"Everyone to your fighters," Trace said, suiting action to words. "We've got at least sixty hostiles incoming. Make that seventy or eighty."

"Oh, hell, make it a few hundred," her XO said. "Looking nasty, too."

"Alright, people, get strapped in and ready to fight," Trace said. "Our goal is blockade, protect the civilian ships. The _Galactica _can look after itself. Work as a squad, people; this isn't a sim. We're not going to get a chance to try again if we screw up the first time around."

"I'd never have known if you hadn't told me," Tanachra said snidely.

"Trace," Tamsin's voice said over the squadron frequency. "You guys packed the A-3 jammers, right?"

"Sure, but that's designed to counter the Kanga coms, not what they've got. Hell, they still use radio."

"No, but it does disperse a large number of small jammers over the battlespace at high speed. Kind of like lots of shrapnel missiles. So if you alter the manoeuvring sequence for extra speed before dispersal…"

"It'll be like a few thousand tiny missiles with no guidance system – hang on…"

"They don't have battle screens," Tamsin assured. "It'll work. Make sure that it's a coherent firing solution that leaves the Vipers room to work, otherwise they'll end up on the receiving end."

"Right," Trace said. "Give us two ticks, we'll add their com system to ours. Sergeant Ang!"

"On it," he replied. "Give me just one second, I'll have it integrated as channel six…"

"Done and done," Trace acknowledged. "And I'm running up our software defence systems. Just in case."

"Nice. I'll be a bit busy, help you as I can."

"Right." Trace LeBeau finished integrating her neural net into the control systems of her interceptor _Marvin_, and could see the approaching hordes of Cylons.

"They're moving fast," she noted. "Faster than I think they should be."

"Must be overloading their engines," Tamsin said. "Apparently they can do that, if they don't mind needing extensive repairs afterwards. These things really don't think the same way Kangas do."

"Great. I understand the Kangas. These Cylons are getting on my nerves."

"Do me a favour and kill them, will you please?" Tamsin asked. "And watch the rear. Use an even dispersal, we're doing a protecting action and not a massive strike."

"Good point." Around the fleet, the large interceptors changed their formation. "We're on it. Bog off, now, Tamsin, we've got work to do."

Tamsin got back to the bridge and went straight over behind Duella. "Tell the fighters to avoid this zone here," she indicated it on the screen with the wrong end of a pen. "Our interceptors are going to fill it with shrapnel moving at high speeds."

Duella nodded and relayed the command just as the interceptors launched their jammers.

"What are they doing?" Tigh asked.

"A-3 jammers – it disperses jamming modules about the size of your fist at high speeds across a wide area of space. Those jammers are designed to screw up communications systems you've never discovered, but they'll make perfectly acceptable space junk. It'll give our interceptors a clear area to work in; they've got battle screens to avoid that sort of thing, and you don't."

"Cylon basestars moving in on attack vector," Gaida said.

"Radiological alarm," Duella said as her console started to beep.

"It means they're carrying nukes," Roslyn explained to Tamsin.

"Trace," she called into her earpiece, "Those base-stars are packing rather a lot of nukes. Try hitting them with novas."

"Done and done."

"Novas?" Adama asked.

"Nova cycle bombs. They – well, let's just say it requires a sequence of nuclear explosions to get the cycle started. One explosion like that can render a planet uninhabitable. We'll see if those work, and if they don't we'll try something heavier and why are you all looking at me like that? It's only light ordinance, after all."

"Something that can destroy a planet is light ordinance?" Tigh said incredulously, wishing for a drink.

"No, that's heavy ordinance. Novas only make it uninhabitable, at least without some rather specialised equipment. Blowing up a planet takes a bit more than fighters usually pack, although some squadrons stationed closer to Earth do pack bombs that can do that to smaller planets."

Everyone was paying her a great deal of attention. "We do have a battle on, you know," she reminded them, seeming to smile.

"Cylon fighters closing," Duella said. "They're flying right across that, that jammer arc… some of them have been destroyed. Interceptor missiles closing on the basestars…"

A ripple ran across her screen as an entire wave of Cylon fighters exploded in space.

"What did that?" She asked.

"Probably the power guns off our interceptors. Don't you use lasers as weapons?"

"What's a laser?" Roslyn asked.

"Coherent light emitters."

"They're still in the development phase – some have been developed for surveying tools," she looked staggered. "You use them as weapons?"

"Metal cutters, sculpting tools, surgical scalpels, communications carrier signals, a lot of things." She shrugged. "Looks like the Cylons can't even detect it. Are they usually so disorganised?"

"No," Adama said.

"Good." One of the base-stars exploded spectacularly, detritus slamming into the six nearer ships. "And their anti-missile systems aren't worth shit either, by the look of it. How many basestars do we need to leave intact so the fighters will pack up and bog off?"

"New Cylon strike force just jumped in behind the fleet," Gaida yelled.

"Trace…" Tamsin called into her earpiece.

The new basestars disintegrated before they could even launch their fighters, and behind them sixteen ships suddenly appeared on the Colonial sensors. A huge stream of fighters moving at high speed erupted from their launching bays, heading straight past the Colonial fleet to strike at the Cylons.

"IT'S THE CAVALRY!" Trace yodelled. "Tamsin, it's the _Jutland_ and the 261st. They were on manoeuvres out of Gurconda!"

Tamsin breathed again. "They're ours," she said. "It's one of our naval squadrons. The big one must be a Hayden class battlecruiser – that's how they got here so fast, those ships are designed for speed."

"How do you know that, you know the ship?" Adama asked.

"Never heard of it in my life," Tamsin said. "But in each class of ship, they're mostly named for one thing, and the Haydens were named for famous wet-navy battles after the introduction of breech-loading guns. The Battle of Jutland was during the First World War, back before space travel was invented. It came along about four decades afterwards." She frowned. "The two-sixty-first squadron. Battle Division Sixty-three, I think – that means Admiral Yonung, and – oh, who were the commodores?" She frowned. "Damn it. Can someone give me a com-line to work with while they get on with the mopping up out there, please?" Outside in just a few seconds, the battle was shifting their way. The Colonials barely had to do anything.

"How'd they get here so fast?" Tigh asked. "How'd they know where to look?"

"They would have tracked the transponders of our interceptors. Those broadcast on n-dimensional warp traces, and if you don't have n-dimensional engines, you won't have the theory to track those, so Trace wouldn't have told her squadron to turn them off. They could have found us blindfold."

"Why didn't we detect them?" Tigh snapped.

"Because our stealth systems are better than your detectors are. We don't install them on the fighters, because they're too bulky, the newer ones. Give it another twenty years, we'll shrink them down. But for now, I want to know who's in charge of those ships and exactly what their orders are." She took the phone Duella handed her. "I think you can call your Vipers back now. There's no need to risk your pilots any more. And Madam President, you might want to see about that press conference you were going to organise."


	26. Looks like you broke your ship, Apollo

**Chapter 26: Looks like you broke your ship, Apollo**

Lee Adama had been startled to see Cylon fighters exploding with no visible reason, but when the first basestar exploded it nearly got him killed. He was still trying to shake the spots out of his eyes when a Cylon fighter nearly destroyed his engines.

Kara managed a textbook manoeuvre to turn and destroy his attacker, but that didn't help him as he began to spin wildly.

"Looks like you broke your ship, Apollo," She called out.

"I've had worse," he repeated the old joke. "But thanks."

"Where the hell did they come from?" Someone asked. An entire wing – not a squadron, no, far more than that – of Federation interceptors whipped into sight, destroying the Cylons as they went. As Adama watched, a barrage of missiles slammed straight into one of the huge interceptors, only to disappear in a burst of light more than a hundred metres out from the hull. The interceptor was undamaged.

Adama managed to get some control back, but his ship wouldn't stop going forwards towards the Cylons.

"_Galactica_ to all Vipers, break off and come on home. Repeat, break off and come on home."

"There's still Cylons out here," he called.

"That's alright, lads," a new voice drawled in a strange accent. "We'll clean them up. Colonel Boru Tamahara at your service, people. Oh, and Dodson, six of those stubbies are damaged. Scoop them up and get them out of here, will you please?"

"Sure thing, sir," The disappointed Dodson replied over the squadron frequency. "Where would you like us to drop you off?" What Lee Adama could only describe as a tiny thin wire with a glob of glue on the end attached itself to his fighter as the interceptor slowed to hang overhead, and he found himself being towed along whether he wanted to or not.

"Don't move or turn too suddenly," Adama said as his Viper tried to go forward following the laws of physics and was held back by this thread.

"Why not?"

"You're nearly pulling my fighter to pieces as it is, there's too much strain on the hull plating."

"Oh, yes. Good thinking. Sorry, we build ours a bit sturdier than all that. Right. This better?"

"Yes. Vipers, head count." They ran through the squadron, getting reports. Adama found they were right – six Vipers damaged or disabled, including him. By that time, all six of them were being towed along like dogs on leashes.

"I've still got spots in front of my eyes," Tiana complained.

"Can you drop us off by the _Galactica_?" Lee asked.

"Hang on, Captain – wait, wait…" There was a moment of silence. "Commodore says we're jumping out of here as soon as possible. Might as well sling you guys onto our ship as yours."

"Some of the ships in the fleet aren't ready to jump."

"We'll improvise. If they're in hull contact with our ships, we can sort of tow them. Won't be pleasant for anyone involved, but it'll get them out of here. Now, let's get _us_ out of here. I don't care to take chances on those Cylons having completely buggered off."

Tamahara's voice broke in again. "Listen up – Vipers, I think it is, and interceptors both. We're jumping to Gurconda Prime the moment we get the chance, so everybody return to your ships. Your six damaged fighters and the two pilots who safely ejected will be making the trip on the _Jutland_, but your entire fleet's going to be docked at the Orbit Ring Battlestations anyway, so don't worry."

"Apollo to _Galactica_," Lee called. "Did you get that?"

"I did," Reece said. "I'll explain it to everyone else who doesn't get it. See you at Gurconda."

"Who's this?" Tamahara asked.

"Captain Tamsin Reece."

"What, the old Iron-Bum Reece from the Academy? I'd have thought you'd have kicked it long ago! You still flying interceptors or did you chicken out and give up the game?"

"Yes, it's me, I'm still qualified but I don't fly, and I most definitely remember you, Boru Tamahara. The incident with the squids was particularly memorable even by Academy standards."

"Squids?" Someone said. "I've got to hear this one."

"Reminisce later, get back to your ships now," she said firmly. "We're heading out in about six minutes."


	27. They paid high

**Chapter 27: They paid high**

"What was that about?" Roslyn asked Reece as she cut the comline.

"Tell you in a minute. I need to talk to the commander of the _Jutland_, explain what's going on."

"Squids?" Tigh said, looking baffled.

"I taught at the Academy on Midgard for a number of years. Colonel Tamahara was one of the more notable pupils. He had a knack for interesting pranks. That one worked very well, but at least I got a calamari dinner out of it." She shook her head. "It was a long time ago."

"How long ago?" Tigh asked.

"Uh…" She paused. "I think he graduated in twenty-five ninety-two, so that'd be…" She paused. "Two hundred seventy-three years ago. Give or take a few months. Yes, that'd be about right. I remember that was just before my son Lucas was born, so it would have to have been about then. I took leave just after graduation that year."

Tigh stared at her in shock. "Two hundred seventy-three years ago?"

"Yeah. If he's survived that long in the interceptor corps, he must have improved quite a lot. Got that channel yet? Good. _Jutland_, this is Captain Tamsin Reece…"

"Roger that, _Galactica_, this is Commodore Athene Santander. I can see you've managed to live up to your reputation and keep things interesting."

"Who's been telling tales?" Reece asked suspiciously.

"My XO is a relative of yours, Antonio Cartwright. Anyhow, if we want to get this fleet to Gurconda before I'm old and grey…"

"It's not that simple, unfortunately," Reece sighed. "They've never discovered multi-dimensional drives. Instead they use some kind of teleportation system that completely disproves Takeshita's Fourth Hypothesis. It's going to make things… interesting."

There was silence for a moment. "My engineer is having hysterics," Santander said dryly. "And I owe Antonio ten credits."

Tamsin sighed. "Can't anyone around here be serious for just five minutes?"

Tigh looked at her in bafflement. "Who's Antonio Cartwright?"

"One of my more eccentric grandsons," Tamsin said dryly, looking too young to be in uniform. "There are times when I feel like I've served with half the galaxy." She took her hand off the phone. "Any word on Avarin Three?"

"They nuked it," Santander said, her voice suddenly flat and deadly. "If there are any survivors, we haven't heard about them yet. But we know they paid high."

"They'll pay even higher before they're done," Tamsin swore.


End file.
